Steve Martini - Double Tap

He opens it and reads. “That’s what I thought.” At this moment Nathan seems filled with regret, his face a portrait of lament. He shakes his head, but doesn’t say anything, as if he can’t speak. “I never wanted it to come to this,” he finally says.

When I look down, he is holding a small automatic, blued gunmetal, the slide on top slick with oil glistening in the light from the streetlamp overhead. It’s almost lost in his hand, which is tucked under his open suit coat. Anyone looking at him, even up close, might think he has his thumb tucked over the top edge of his belt, talking to me western style.

A block down, on Broadway, the street is teeming with people, all heading home at rush hour. But on the side street along the courthouse, the sidewalk is empty.

The gun looks like a.380. Deadly. Gangbangers use them all the time because they are easy to hide.

“Nathan, you don’t want to do this.”

“You’re right, I don’t.” He shakes his head.

I can’t imagine the panic and confusion going on inside his brain at this moment.

“Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?” he says. “You won your case. Your man is free. Why did you have to go poking your nose in? I love you, but you’re a. .”

A woman comes out the door of the library, shoots us a quick glance, and keeps going.

“You’re a pain in the ass.” He finishes the thought.

I start to walk past him, like I’m going to follow the woman toward the courthouse across the street. Kwan moves in front of me and blocks the way, his little pistol almost in my stomach.

“Don’t. I want to talk,” he says. “I want you to understand.”

“Nathan, listen to yourself. Do you hear what you’re saying?” At the moment I have to wonder if I’m talking to Jekyll or Hyde.

His eyes dart toward the entrance of the library, where the lights have just flickered. Closing time. He knows we can’t stand here.

“Let’s go this way.” He follows up the suggestion by nudging me with his free hand, turning me away from the courthouse.

I turn and start to walk, slowly.

“Nathan, listen to me.”

I start to raise my hands, he says, “Put ‘em down.”

“Nathan.”

“Don’t. . don’t talk right now, just walk.”

He is right behind me, the pistol in his outside coat pocket. Nathan knows this is a risky area. The jail is just down the street ahead of us, the courthouse behind us.

When someone has a gun in your back, there is a natural inclination to cooperate. But reason tells me that, given what I now know, if he gets me out of this area, I’m a dead man.

He comes up next to me like we’re two friends strolling down the sidewalk, with me on the inside. He now has both hands stuffed into the pockets of his suit jacket so that it looks more natural. End-of-the-day working stiff just stretching the pockets of his coat.

If I try to run he is going to put a bullet in me. Maybe more than one, considering the speed with which a.380 can fire.

In the distance I see a figure, a lone man wearing jeans and a light tan jacket as he steps from the main entrance of the county jail a block away. He turns and walks up the street toward us on the other side. In the dim light just after dusk I cannot make out any features, though he appears to be looking this way. For an instant I think about calling out. Nathan reads my mind.

“Let’s take a shortcut.” He takes his left hand out of his pocket, turns to me, and guides me toward an alley that divides the block.

“Keep going,” he says. He’s looking around, at the sides of the building and the utility poles. My guess is Nathan is looking for cameras. He’s not taking me for a ride. Whatever he’s going to do, he intends to do it here.

Kwan is pushing me westward along the alley. This is not good. There is nothing ahead except littered service entrances and a few dumpsters. With muni buses a block away, revving their engines as they pull away from the bus stop at rush hour, if Nathan pushes me against the side of a building and gets up close, he could put a bullet in me and it’s possible no one would even hear it.

We cross the street and we’re halfway down the alley on the next block when he stops just beyond the end of a large green metal dumpster. “This will do,” he says.

I turn and look at him. “This is where you want to talk?”

He pushes me into the breach formed by the end of the metal bin and the concrete protrusion that is the rear service entrance to a building.

My back is against the wall.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he says. “You couldn’t.” There’s a sound like someone clearing his throat in the alley behind him.

As Nathan turns to look, there is a quick flash, a reflection off an arcing stream that disappears in the shadows of his face, his free hand reaching up toward his eyes. The stringent smell.

I hear him moan as I reach out and push the hand with the gun to the side and away.

“Excuse me.” Before I can even process what I am seeing, Emiliano Ruiz closes the distance like an apparition. He is wearing jeans and a tan jacket, the figure I saw exiting the jail. In a fluid motion he takes the gun in one hand and the back of Nathan’s head in the other. When he brings his knee up, Kwan’s head sounds like a hollow melon hitting a boulder. Nathan’s knees buckle, and he hits the asphalt like a sack of cement.

Stripping the clip from the.380, Emiliano pulls the slide and ejects the round from the chamber while he bares his teeth, holding a small red plastic squirt gun between them.

I’m leaning against the wall of the building, unable to stand upright with Kwan lying across my feet.

Ruiz takes the squirt gun from between his teeth, tosses the metal pistol into the dumpster, and crushes the clip under the heel of his shoe. Then he rolls Kwan off my feet so I can stand up.

Ruiz is wearing street clothes, the T-shirt, jacket, and jeans that I must assume he was wearing the night the cops arrested him. You would never recognize him in a crowd. The everyman, wiry and invisible.

“They took me back to the jail so I could change, get my stuff. I was heading back to the courthouse to look for you. You disappeared. Then I saw you coming this way, but you went down the alley. I thought I’d check it out. Didn’t think you guys were ever gonna stop walking,” he says. “And I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye.”

Every so often my thoughts drift to Jim Kaprosky and the notion that at least someone benefited from his years of toil in legal hell. Emiliano Ruiz is a free man.

In all, he had spent more than a year behind bars, confined in county jail, awaiting trial. For twenty-three hours each day he had been held in an eight-by-twelve-foot cell, isolated from other inmates because of information, vague in its nature, communicated by the military to jail officials that Ruiz was skilled in the martial arts and that he should be considered an extreme risk as an inmate.

About six months ago I received a letter. It was from Emiliano. He now lives somewhere along the Deschutes River in the state of Oregon, He has gone to court in order to legally change his name in an effort to recover some of the peace and privacy that he had before he became branded in the public psyche as the “Double Tap Killer.” Along with the letter was a picture of Emiliano standing in front of a small mobile home. Next to him was his new wife. She was holding their first child. Both were flaming redheads.

Nathan Kwan was arrested and prosecuted for the murder of Madelyn Chapman, attempted murder for his acts in the alley with me, as well as a number of felonies involving political corruption. Kwan’s lawyers were able to cut a deal so that the former legislator and congressman is now serving a term of more than thirty years at Pelican Bay.