Эд Макбейн - Guns

The door opens magically.

He expects it will be an entire police precinct coming in the store here, but it’s only Teddy. Teddy’s face is all squinched up and sweaty, he looks as if he’s going to start bawling any second. But he loops Jocko’s right arm over his shoulder, and together they drag him out on the sidewalk. The heat out there comes up into Colley’s face like a puff of black smoke. He almost chokes on the heat. He begins to sweat profusely as they carry and drag and pull Jocko up the block — where’s the car, does Teddy know where the car is? — the sweat coming through his clothes, or is that Jocko’s blood? A lady stops in the middle of the sidewalk and looks at them. Colley yells at her, he doesn’t even know what he yells, and she backs off a pace. He yells again, and she moves away even further, and he remembers one time at the Bronx Zoo when a tiger in his cage began roaring and everybody backed away; the lady is backing away like that now.

Teddy opens the front door of the car, and Colley throws Jocko in on the seat, but Jocko’s front legs are hanging out on the sidewalk. This becomes another problem he doesn’t know how to solve. He can’t close the door with Jocko’s legs hanging out like that, but Teddy is already running around the front of the car, Teddy is already in the car, Teddy is slamming the door on his side, Teddy is starting the fuckin car, he yells at Teddy to hold it a fuckin minute! He keeps staring at Jocko’s legs hanging out of the car, trying to figure out how to get them inside. Teddy is hollering at him now Get in, Colley, for Christ’s sake, get in! but he keeps staring at Jocko’s legs until finally it occurs to him that all he has to do is swivel Jocko around on the seat, change the position of his body so that his legs are inside the car too. He puts both arms under the backs of Jocko’s knees, and he swivels him in that way, and then he steps back as though he has all the time in the world to examine what he’s just accomplished, even though Teddy is still yelling at him to get in the car.

He floats on sneakered feet to the back door of the car, and reaches out in slow motion for the handle, and opens the door and gets inside. He hears the solid thump of the door when it closes behind him, but he has no recollection of having pulled it closed. He is remembering instead the ridiculous gold and blue shield. He is remembering the red and white and yellow globules that exploded from the back of the man’s head. What he finally tells Teddy is close to the truth, but it is not the exact truth. He is unconsciously editing the memory, the way in confession when he was a kid he edited his sins so Jesus Christ our Lord wouldn’t have suffered in vain and so God Almighty wouldn’t send down a lightning bolt to strike him dead right there in St. Augustine’s.

“I shot a man,” he says.

He does not say, “I killed a cop.”

As Teddy runs the red light on the corner, Colley is thinking only that his grandmother wouldn’t go to her own brother’s funeral because it took place on the thirteenth day of the month.

They were worried that the lady in the basement had seen the blood.

They had parked the car behind Jocko’s building, and then had come in through the back door, into the basement, carrying Jocko between them. There was a lady there near the washing machines, but she was busy putting in detergent and they went right by her, hoping she’d think it was some guys bringing home a drunken buddy. She hardly looked at them as they went past her to the elevator. But now they were worrying she had maybe seen the blood.

Jocko was still bleeding.

The blood had slowed to a steady seep, but it was still coming from under the sleeve of his windbreaker and dripping onto the floor of the elevator. There was no one in the elevator with them, they were grateful for that. They had driven past the front stoop of the building first, and had almost lost heart when they saw all those people sitting there on the steps talking; this was ten o’clock on a hot night in August, and nobody was eager to go upstairs to apartments like furnaces. It was Teddy who got the idea to drive around to the big open parking lot behind the building, then go in the door to the basement. The sleeve of Jocko’s poplin wind-breaker was covered with blood, and his pants were covered with blood, and there was almost as much blood on Teddy and Colley from carrying him.

“You think she seen the blood?” Teddy asked again.

“No,” Colley said, “she didn’t see it, stop worrying about it, will you?” But he was worried himself.

The elevator stopped on the fifth floor, and they eased Jocko out into the hallway, and then belatedly looked around to see if anybody was there. Without a word — they knew where the apartment was, they had both been here before — they turned to their right and started toward the end of the hall. Behind them, the elevator doors closed, and the elevator began whining down the shaft again. Outside apartment 5G, Colley rang the doorbell.

“Just like Jeanine to have gone to a movie,” Teddy said.

“No, she’ll be home. Night of a job, she’ll be home,” Colley said, and rang the bell again. They could hear chimes sounding inside the apartment. Colley thought he heard a television set going, but that might have been in the apartment next door. He pressed the bell button again. The peephole flap suddenly went up, and then fell again an instant later. They heard the door being unlocked — first the deadbolt, then the Fox lock, then the night chain. The door opened wide.

Jeanine stood slightly to the side to let them past. She didn’t scream, she didn’t say a word. She’d already seen them through the peephole, so she knew something had gone wrong. She just watched them silently now as they moved past her into the living room, and then she closed and locked the door behind them — first the deadbolt, then the Fox lock, and then the chain. They were standing in the middle of the living room waiting for her to tell them where to take her husband, who was dripping blood all over the rug. She didn’t ask what happened, she didn’t ask how bad it was, she didn’t say a word. She began walking toward the rear of the apartment instead, and they followed her without being told to follow her. Jocko was beginning to weigh a ton. He was a big man to begin with, and now they were practically dragging him across the floor, his feet trailing, his two hundred and twenty pounds multiplying with each step they took.

“In the bathroom,” Jeanine said.

They managed to squeeze him through the narrow bathroom door by going through it sideways, and then they sat him down on the toilet bowl, and Jeanine began undressing him. She was wearing white shorts cut high on the leg, an orange halter top, no shoes. Her long blond hair was hanging loose around her face as she took off his windbreaker and then began unbuttoning the white shirt under it. Both the shirt and the windbreaker were soaked with blood, and each time she brushed her hair away from her face, she got blood on her cheek and in the hair itself.

She had good features going a bit fleshy; Colley guessed she was in her late thirties, maybe closer to forty. Her eyes were dark green, not that pale jade you saw on most light-complexioned women, but a deeper green — like an emerald a burglar had once showed him. She had a good sensible nose with a tiny scar on the bridge that made it look like she’d lived with the nose a long time, had sniffed around with it a little, had maybe stuck it in places where it didn’t belong, and had it broken or slashed. The nose and the eyes and the mouth, those were what gave her face definition. The mouth was full, the upper lip lifting gently away from her teeth, so that you always saw a flash of white and got the impression she was parting her lips about to say something. Her skin was very white; he imagined she turned lobster-red in the sun. Years ago she’d been a stripper down in Dallas, Jocko told him, and she still had a stripper’s body, heavy breasts in the halter top, generous hips, good legs showing below the brief shorts, thighs a bit fleshy, like her face, but the calves firm, tapering to slender ankles. Her feet were big. Her feet were peasant’s feet. They didn’t seem to go with that face and that body.