Брайан Гарфилд - Death Sentence

There was a thin stream of pedestrian traffic to and from the late-closing supermarket; he went past it, the price placards in the windows and the closed-circuit security eyes high on the walls and the armed private guard near the door. Next to it was a liquor store, closed, a steel grillwork locked over its windows; then an Army-Navy surplus store and finally at the corner the pawnshop overhung by its spherical brass triad. Paul went inside and browsed for five minutes, exchanged not more than four words with the proprietor and returned to the street.

When he reached the sidewalk he had his wallet in his hand and he was counting the money in it as if he had just put it there. He thrust the wallet clumsily into his outside coat pocket, making a show of it, and walked back past the supermarket to the next corner, moving his hand inside the coat pocket, switching his grip from the wallet to the .38 revolver.

A policeman, even a dedicated one, had to wait for a crime to be committed within reach before he could act on it. His very presence, in uniform, would discourage the crime’s commission in any case. Long ago Paul had learned not to waste his time in fruitless search for felons in the act of committing crimes; the odds were too long. A robbery took place in the city every three minutes according to Mike Ludlow but it was an enormous city and there were three million potential victims.

It was much more certain if you invited them to make you their victim.

When he turned the corner he half-expected to be followed but he wasn’t. No one had been tempted by the bulging wallet or the pawnshop customer’s evident carelessness.

Dry run: a dud. Well you couldn’t expect them to tumble every time.

He continued into the deeper shadows and his eyes had to accustom themselves to the inferior light farther along the block; he turned once, squinting, to make sure no one was tailing him. The sidewalk remained empty. Summoning patience he put his back to the boulevard, relaxed his grip on the gun and continued along the cracked concrete without hurry. As his eyes dilated he looked up along the sagging weathered stoops of the tenements: here and there a dim bulb but most of the entrances were unlit. There was no one in sight: it wasn’t a place where you would sit on the porch to take the air. In any case flakes drifted by and the night was too chill for it.

It was only the suggestion of a stirring in the corner of his vision but it made sweat burst out on his palms. He stopped bolt-still.

There by the car. His car.

Nothing.

But when he passed his eyes over the car again he saw a subtle line that wasn’t part of the car’s silhouette: just visible, a flat shadow no bigger than a paperback book...

He walked forward. Twenty-five feet, twenty and he had it then: it was the flat crown of a hat behind the fender. The man was crouching behind the car and didn’t realize quite how high his hat was.

Paul kept walking as if to go by the car. A sidewise glance: the hat was moving, the man was circling behind the car, crabbing his way into the street in order to stay behind cover as Paul walked past.

By the front bumper Paul pivoted on his right foot and leaped between the cars and hauled the Centennial from his pocket. He wheeled past the car and the man looked up in naked amazement — reared back in fear, lost his balance and had to whip one stiff arm behind him to brace his palm against the pavement.

Something extended from the man’s hand. The man lifted it as if it were a weapon.

Paul shot him in the face. The man’s elbow unlocked and he went down on his back. His leather hat rolled into the center of the street.

The tool rested in his splayed hand: a twisted length of coat-hanger wire. Standard for breaking into car windows.

Paul plugged his key into the door, dived into the car and started it with a gnashing grind. He locked the wheel to the left and cramped the car out of the parking space. He felt it when the rear wheel rolled over the dead man’s outstretched arm.

He went down the street without lights: if there was a witness he didn’t want his license plate to show. He turned two successive corners before he switched on the headlamps and slipped into the stream of boulevard traffic. He drove up Lake Shore Drive obsessed by the knowledge that he might have left a clue: the print of his rear tire on the dead man’s flesh.

He worked it out in his head. He drove right past his apartment building and continued into the North Side and turned off there, cruising until he found a quiet block. Ignored by occasional passing cars he jacked up the car and changed the rear tire, putting the spare on the car. Then he unscrewed the valve of the tire and bled the air out of it.

When it had gone soft he used the tire iron to pry the tire off the wheel rim. He didn’t have proper tools and it was a hard job; he worked steadily, without desperation but steadied by necessity. Finally the tire came off the wheel and he drove west until he found a weedy lot cluttered with trash. He wiped the tire off, wary of fingerprints, and left it there amid the junk; then he drove back to the apartment. Tomorrow he’d buy a new spare tire.

It was well after midnight by the time he’d cleaned and reloaded the Centennial. He switched on the radio and tuned to the all-news station but there was no report of the South Side killing yet. At one o’clock he turned it off and showered and went to bed, trying to put faces on the images of the three men who always drifted in the back of his mind: the savages who’d broken into the apartment and mauled Esther and Carol.

He’d never found them; he’d never expected to. When you set out to eradicate a disease-bearing species of insects you didn’t hunt for particular individual insects.

It was a cool day oppressed by a hydrocarbon haze. Sea gulls from the lake flew inland reconnaissance over the city. It was four o’clock; soon it would be dusk. Paul walked into the shop: Tax Returns Prepared — CHECKS CASHED — Xerox While-U-Wait. He went to the check-cashing counter and engaged in twenty seconds’ conversation with the cashier: he asked direction to the nearest El station, the location of which he knew already but for anyone watching him it established that he’d gone to the check-cashing window. He took his wallet out of his pocket and fiddled with it before he turned away from the window; he was still counting the money in it when he emerged onto the street.

He had performed the ritual several times and it hadn’t tempted anyone yet but he kept at it because he needed at least one more immediate target to convince the press of his existence.

When he reached the street a police cruiser was prowling by with its roof-bar of siren and lights and its lettered decals on the door. Paul counted his money again and then put the wallet in his coat pocket and turned the corner into a street lined with old frame houses streaked with watermarks.

Halfway down the block he stopped and patted his pockets as if he’d lost something. It gave him an excuse to turn a circle on his heels and search the sidewalk behind him. Down at the corner a thin jittery figure in a threadbare jacket stood restlessly: a youth bouncing on his arches like an athlete waiting to compete. Behind him a woman went across the street jerking a small wailing child by the hand.

A second youth appeared and joined the first.

Paul reached down and picked up an invisible object and put it in his pocket and walked on.

To his right a windowless clapboard wall had been decorated with spray-gun artwork. The houses beyond were dreary and lifeless. Chicago’s slums were spacious and airy by comparison with New York’s crowded high tenement buildings; the streets were wide, the buildings low. But the desolation had the same smell.