Эд Макбейн - Guns

“Hey, you!” the cop yells.

There are garbage cans and rakes and rubber hoses in the back part of the store, sprinklers, trowels, bags of fertilizer — this is the gardening section of this drugstore that’s a supermarket. There are metal garbage cans and plastic garbage cans. He picks up one of the heavy metal cans and hurls it at the glass door, but it just bounces off the fuckin door, the door has got to be made of steel though it only looks like glass. He picks up a rake and swings it at the door, and the wooden handle of the rake breaks in half, and the door still hasn’t got a dent in it. The cop is yelling “You, hey you!” and there is nothing Colley can do now but run toward the front of the store again, either that or be taken. There are three aisles in the store, and the cop is running down the center aisle, the gun getting bigger and bigger as he comes closer and closer. Colley breaks for the aisle on the left, and the gun goes off like a cannon, putting a huge hole in the glass door behind him. Colley is sure it is a Magnum now, and he is afraid of it, he does not want to get shot with a Magnum.

He is running up an aisle that has glassware in it, Pyrex dishes and serving bowls and drinking glasses and brandy snifters, this is some drugstore. He knows that when the cop reaches the end of the center aisle, he will come around into this aisle, and he will drop to one knee and steady his firing arm and put a big hole in Colley’s back. He has already fired his warning shot, and he is shouting “Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!” as he comes running down the center aisle, Colley going in the opposite direction up the aisle on the left. There is a space above the shelves, an open space, the drugstore has a high vaulted ceiling and the shelves are really only dividers between the aisles. He climbs the divider on his right the way he climbed that fence in the Bronx, only now he is knocking glasses and dishes and cups and saucers to the floor; the entire glasswares department of this fine drugstore-super-market-department store is crashing into the aisle as he climbs the divider and rolls over the top of it as if it is a back-yard fence, and drops into the middle aisle. The blue hat drops from his head. He does not stop to pick it up.

He comes sprinting up the aisle, heading straight for the checkout counter. The cashier has stopped reading her confession magazine, there is a true story unfolding right here where she works, and she is watching Colley goggle-eyed as he runs toward her. For no good reason, she starts screaming. Behind him, the trooper has figured out that Colley isn’t in the aisle on the left any more, he has climbed over the divider and is in the center aisle again. But Colley has a good lead on him, and even when the trooper opens fire behind him, he feels confident he is going to make it through the checkout counter and out of the store. The cashier ducks, she is afraid she’s going to get shot by accident. Colley runs past her and veers sharply to his left, toward the front door. In a minute he is outside in the parking lot. He does not know whether to keep running, or take the pickup truck, or steal the trooper’s car. He wonders if the trooper has left his keys in the car. He doubts it.

He decides to run.

He has always been good at running.

He runs parallel to the front of the drugstore, and then cuts sharply around the edge of the building and into the woods behind it. If the trooper has seen him going into the woods, Colley will still be better off in here than running on the highway, in the open. He is wearing Sam Hollip’s blue pants and white short-sleeved shirt, this is the second time in twelve hours he’s had on clothes belonging to another man. He wishes the pants and the shirt were green, be better camouflage if the trooper opens fire again. But he does not hear any thrashing in the woods behind him; is it possible the trooper didn’t see him coming in here? He tries to remember the kind of lead he had on the trooper, was it long enough so that by the time the trooper came out the front door, Colley would already have been around the side of the building? But wouldn’t the trooper have seen him through the plate-glass windows, running toward the right? And wouldn’t he have guessed that Colley’d be heading for the woods instead of the highway?

The terrain slopes sharply upward, he is doing more climbing than he is running, but he still doesn’t hear anything behind him — is it possible? Is it possible that dumb trooper doesn’t know he’s in here? He begins to suspect a trap. Maybe the trooper knows a shortcut, maybe he’s circling around from another direction, he’ll spring out of the woods the way Sam Hollip’s monster dog did. But the only sound in the woods is the sound of Colley’s own breathing, and the crackle of twigs underfoot as he labors up the incline, and the hum of insects and the occasional voice of a bird. Nothing else. He is getting very good at hearing things in the woods, despite the fact that he is only a city boy. Maybe they will do an article on him once this is all over. Put his picture on the cover of a magazine. He does not have much hair on his chest, however.

He has reached the crest of the hill now. The ground is level here, the rock outcropping covered with soil and tufted with weeds. On the other side the ground rolls gently away into a grassy valley. There are wild flowers in the valley, blue and yellow and white and lavender. The sun is shining brightly, and there is a single cloud in the sky; it hangs motionless, a puff of white.

He starts slowly down the gentle slope.

He does not know how long he has been walking. He has forgotten to wind his watch, and it has stopped at four o’clock, and he does not know what time it is now. Ahead of him, beyond a fringe of trees, he hears voices and laughter.

He has come through the valley and into a woods on the other side of it. He has rested more than once in dappled clearings, and he has stopped to drink water from a trickle of a stream deep in the woods. He has crossed a pasture of waist-high grass, butterflies circling, grasshoppers leaping ahead of him, and now he comes through yet another glade, and cautiously approaches the voices and the laughter. He crouches. He peers through the leaves.

There are men and women in bathing suits on a lawn as emerald-bright as the valley had been. The pool beyond sparkles with late-afternoon sunshine. A black man in a white jacket and black trousers is standing behind a table covered with a white cloth. There are whiskey bottles and glasses on the table, a dish with lemon peels and lime wedges, another dish with olives. The black man is mixing a drink for a tall blond suntanned woman wearing a white string bikini. A fat man wearing red trunks and black-rimmed glasses is telling a joke. When he finishes the joke, the circle of men and women around him burst out laughing.

Colley would love a drink. He would love nothing better than to stroll out of the woods and up to the bar, ask the nigger for a gin and tonic. A gin and tonic would hit the spot now. The fat man is obviously the host. He leaves the group of people he’s just told the joke to, and wanders over to another group, probably to tell the same joke. If he was any kind of host, he’d ask Colley to come out of the woods and have a gin and tonic. There are great-looking women here, none of them spring chickens, but all of them tall and suntanned and wearing hardly any clothes.

There is the smell of money hanging over this place. The black man has set up his bar on a flagstone terrace covered with a striped awning, red and yellow. Behind the terrace, there are mullioned doors leading to a room in shadow beyond. The house is very big, ivy-covered stone rising to turrets and gabled windows, a slate roof, copper gutters, a huge chimney with three green hooded cones sticking out of it. The women are sleek and tan and swift as race horses, and the men ignore them the way only rich men would, talking instead about their investments in oil or soybeans, talking about their clubs in New York, talking about the great squash game they had yesterday, after which they came off the court and drank some beer advertised on television, talking about the business trips they will take to Europe in the fall, and the French girls they are going to fuck when they get to Paris.