Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

“With Gemini rising, I’ll bet. Well, Jesus Christ, Doak. That’s a big step, buying the guns.”

“But?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to be a downer, but—”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, could you actually go through with it? I mean there’s a difference between buying a gun and pulling the trigger, isn’t there?”

“Absolutely.”

“You never actually did it, did you? Kill somebody, I mean.”

“Yes.”

A pause. “Yes as in yes you did, or yes you know what I mean?”

“I killed a man once,” he said.

“How did—”

“With a gun. I shot him and he died.”

She thought about this. “You were a policeman.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was self-defense,” she said. “It was in the line of duty.”

“That’s how it went in the books,” he said, “but that’s not how it was. I murdered him.”

He’d never told anyone.

He was working a case, knocking on doors on a mixed block on the Lower East Side, the same tenements housing Wall Street guys and corporate lawyers in four-figure monthly rentals alongside rent-controlled tenants who paid less for rent each month than their yuppie neighbors spent on sushi.

He could remember when you didn’t walk on that block if you didn’t have to, and now the storefronts were all designer clothes and vegan restaurants.

He was in a building, going door to door, trying to find someone who might have had eyes on the street three nights earlier when somebody gave a young man named Raisin Little a double-tap with a .22. Raisin had a yellow sheet that ran to drug busts, and it was a fair bet that whoever shot him was in the same line of work. As far as Doak was concerned it was a PSH, a public-service homicide, but you did what you could to clear those, too.

And gentrification made that a little more possible than it might have been in the old days, because the new people didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to talk to the cops.

The woman in 3-G was a junior copywriter at a Madison Avenue agency but was thinking of bailing on that because a couple of friends were starting a web-based company and wanted her to go in with them, and it sounded like fun, and there was always the chance it would work and somebody would buy them out for like a billion dollars. I mean it could happen, right?

And no, she’d heard about the shooting, because how could you not? It had happened right across the street, and she was home and heard the gunfire, or at least she thought now that she must have heard it, but you heard loud noises all the time, and if she even thought about it she thought it was a car backfiring or kids throwing firecrackers, and could someone please tell her what was it anyway with Chinese kids and firecrackers? So if what she heard was in fact the end of Little Raisin (she got the name turned around, but so did one of the tabloids), well, she never looked out the window to see what was going on, and if she had she probably wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway and—

A woman screamed.

Not on TV, not out on the street. It was right there in that apartment, or maybe next door, and—

“Oh, God,” the copywriter said. “They’re at it again. The fun couple in 3-F, and I know he’s going to kill her one of these days.”

Another scream, and the sound of something banging into something. Furniture overturned.

“I keep thinking maybe I should call the police, but I don’t know, I have to live next to them, and — was that a gunshot?”

It was, and it was followed by another gunshot, and Doak was out in the hall now, his .38 drawn. He tried the knob, and when the door didn’t open he reared back to kick it in.

It must have been just a snap-lock holding it, because the door burst open, and just as it did there was a gunshot and a bullet sailed past him on the left, about shoulder high.

He saw a huge man, barefoot, wild-eyed, wearing stained baggy sweat pants and no shirt, with a gun in his hand.

“Police! Don’t move!”

That was what you were trained to shout, and he shouted it loud and clear, and the guy heard him and didn’t have to think it over. He swung toward Doak and pointed the gun at him and squeezed the trigger, all before Doak’s brain could tell his hand to point and shoot.

He thought, I’m dead .

And heard the hammer click on an empty chamber.

The guy grinned, he fucking grinned , and tossed the gun aside. “No bullets,” he said, and threw his hands in the air, palms facing forward. “No bullets. Bitch got ’em all.”

Nodding to his left, where a woman lay slumped against the wall while her blood pooled on the floor around her. You didn’t need to take her pulse to know she was gone.

And that was the moment, frozen in time. The man with his hands in the air, that grin on his face, mocking his captor with his act of surrender.

But a good collar, a great collar. Too late to do the woman any good, but there had never been a chance to do anything for her, and at least he could take in the man who’d killed her. Get him to put his hands on the wall, get him to move his feet away from the wall, grab his hands one at a time, cuff them behind his back.

And call it in.

That grin, that fucking grin on his face— The .38 bucked in his hand.

“Three times,” he said. “I pulled the trigger three times, bam-bam-bam, I put three in his chest, grouped them so close together your hand could have covered all three at once. Did I say he didn’t have a shirt on?”

“Yes.”

“Hardly any hair on his chest, just maybe a dozen wispy hairs right in the middle. He was such an animal you’d expect him to have a pelt like a bear, but no. His skin was fishbelly white, too, like he never left the house in the daytime.”

She sat there, letting him tell it.

He said, “I made a conscious decision. I knew what to do — cuff the fucker, call it in — and instead I went ahead and shot him dead. Bam-bam-bam, and I got him in the heart, and I think he must have been dead before he even knew he’d been shot.

“I looked around, half-expecting to see the copywriter from next door in the hallway. But she’d had the sense to stay where she was, in fact she’d locked herself in. I was all by myself with a dead man and a dead woman. He’d killed her and I killed him and nobody saw a thing.

“He’d tossed the gun halfway across the room. I didn’t put it in his hand but I did the next best thing, nudging it with my foot, steering it to where it might have fallen if he’d been holding it when he was shot.

“Then I called it in and waited for the place to fill up with cops.

“I probably would have been all right anyway, but I caught a break. It turned out there were two live cartridges in his gun. It was a six-shot revolver, and I don’t know if he spun the cylinder at some point or if he’d only loaded some chambers, but when the gun clicked on a spent cartridge, all he had to do was keep pulling the trigger and he’d have hit a live one.

“If he’d known that he might have killed me. But he didn’t and he tossed the gun, and when they examined the weapon there was no way to guess what had actually gone down, because the loaded gun fit the story I was telling. Which is that he was shooting at me, and they dug the one round out of the wall in the hallway, and that he’d have kept on firing at me if I hadn’t shot him first.”

“So you were all right.”

“Any time you discharge your weapon,” he said, “there’s a lot of shit you go through. They take it away, and you’re in for a stretch of desk duty until the formal inquiry’s completed. As far as the tabloids were concerned I was a hero cop, at least for a couple of days. And I got through the inquiry without any real trouble. Why hadn’t I called for backup? Because I never had a chance. I’d been doing routine canvassing, looking for a witness to the Raisin Little shooting, and my partner was off doing the same thing in a building across the street, because it didn’t take two people to knock on a door when there was no reason to expect anything other than a law-abiding citizen on the other side of it. So yeah, I was all right. I’d justifiably used deadly force in self-defense.”