April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

“What are you doing to me?” he said.

I gasped. It was like his knee was penetrating to my bladder.

“Get out of my life. Get out of my business. Stay away from my pussy.”

He let me go, and I kicked him.

“You bitch!”

He backed up, clutching his groin.

“Get out of here!” I roared, but instead he sprang forward and grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down on the deep rose coffee table. The edge went into my back and my head snapped. I kept on kicking, and he backed off and was groping himself and spinning around and saying, “You bitch! You bitch!” I rolled off the coffee table. I could feel warm blood down my leg as if he had ruptured something inside. My intestines hurt and I retched. I was hunched over holding my stomach.

I had instinctively moved in front of the couch, keeping the coffee table between us.

“Stay over there,” I warned.

Andrew veered forward.

Inside the drawer of the deep rose coffee table was the Colt.32. I pulled it out and aimed the gun at Andrew.

“If you don’t leave right now I’ll shoot you.”

He looked at me with reddened eyes, leaning over, cupping his groin. The only light in the room was from the TV. He came at me. He kept coming. I fired once, wounding him in the torso.

A small-caliber round, especially with old hard-ball copper-jacketed bullets sitting in there from the time my grandfather had given me the gun, does not produce big holes. Still, I found it hard to believe he was coming at me again, but he was. I fired and he tackled me, and the shot went into the wall. We flew backwards over the coffee table and halfway onto the couch. The gun went off for the third time, hitting him in the thigh. We wrestled for control of the barrel, slippery with blood and meat. His big heavy body was on top of mine, and I saw his leg dripping blood. Then he just stood up and got off me. He walked out the front door and left it wide open.

I staggered into the kitchen. I walked around in a circle, dazed, then I thought, Where is he going? and ran down the hallway after him.

Andrew was already outside at the carport. He had one hand pressed against his rib cage and with the other he was awkwardly trying to open the door.

“What are you doing, Andy? Please stop, Andy. Andy, wait. Please let me call the paramedics—”

He never spoke. Somehow he had gotten the gun. I didn’t realize it, but I had known, disoriented in the kitchen, something was wrong because I was no longer holding the gun. Now he tossed it into the passenger seat. I was gripping the top of the driver’s door. We had a little tug-of-war, I tried to pull it open, but he was stronger and jerked it out of my hands and slammed it and drove away. The glass was streaked with blood. We must have been out there less than a minute. Nobody saw us and nobody heard the low-velocity shots over the sounds of the TV.

I went inside and locked the door to my apartment and stood there. My insides were burning. I went into the bathroom and urinated blood.

My ankle hurt. My head hurt from where it concussed against the coffee table. I came back into the living room. There was glass all over my floor. I picked up three bullet casings. I put a pad in my underwear to absorb the blood and lay down on the couch. I needed to call somebody. I lay there in a stream of blood and tears, thinking someone would come and take care of this, but nobody came.

I swept up the glass. The sun had come up by then. I crouched in a bathtub full of lukewarm water and then crawled out, clutching my gut like some primitive thing. Then I got dressed and went to work.

I went up in the elevator and got off and used my card to access the revolving entry. I passed through a smudged white door that led to the Corridor of Winds and out to the matrix. Setting the briefcase down, I took off the blazer and hung it on a wooden hanger that went on a peg beneath a brass plaque that said Special Agent Ana Grey on a square column of dark wood — a masculine touch, like the posts on a booth in a bar and grill, that marked our territories.

My personal territory that day was a region of numb, disbelieving shock. The ritualized motions of entry and claim did nothing to make it familiar. This was not a place I could have imagined, nothing I had been trained for, a scenario so extraordinary the conscious mind could not hold it all at once, but like a poor clay pot in a fiery kiln, cracked in two. I always thought of working for the FBI as a privilege to serve my community — yet here I was, sitting in my senior-rank ergonomic chair (the chair was a cheap knockoff), scheming like a criminal: You cannot appear upset. You cannot appear to have prior knowledge of what happened to Andrew .

Although I may have seemed to be scrolling through e-mail, I was frantic. My head turned. The chair swiveled. It was early, but I could not stop watching for the arrival of Rick and the troops. Would they provide safe passage — or the opposite? If they knew, they would have no choice. It would be moi kneeling down on the carpeted box in the office in the garage, hands cuffed behind my back, while Hugh Akron hovered lasciviously with the ink pad. Suddenly it seemed a spectacularly bad idea to be there. Leave .

I got as far as the bathroom.

“Put cold water on your face,” my grandfather would command, after he had made me cry. I would weep for an hour during his violent verbal tirades. I hardly remember what they were about — boys, virginity — but I would cower on the narrow bed while he stood in the doorway smoking cigarettes and ranting. If my hands weren’t clean before dinner, he would spoon dirt from a potted plant onto my plate. He was not crazy, nor a drunk. He was, as far as I can figure it, a rage-aholic, addicted to the power of his own anger. Once, when I was late coming home from a date, he surprised me at the front door with a crack across the head.

“Go. Put water on your face.”

Dismissed, I would slink off with mongrel gratitude.

Years later, I had authority and carried a gun; I had long surpassed the status my grandfather held as lieutenant in the Long Beach Police Department, but in the mirror now saw only turbulent red-faced chaos, a guilt-ridden mess for which Poppy would have only had contempt. “You messed up, stupid.” I willed the tears to stop and when they would not, smacked my own temple with the heel of my hand. I did it again, alone in the tidy rest room.

When I emerged, Barbara Sullivan was coming right at me with bright alert eyes. She had just arrived at work, loaded with shopping bags and cartons to be mailed.

“Do you believe it? Deirdre’s already outgrown her six-month stuff. I have to return all these gifts!” she sang, and swept into her office as if I had replied; as if I were not paralyzed with fear of what she might have seen in my face, macabre and chalky-looking from the powder I had hurriedly pressed over swollen eyelids and hot cheeks.

I don’t know what impression I gave. But then I had truly become my shadow self, and shadows are tricksters with canny ways of deception. So maybe Ana Grey was standing there beaming, and maybe when Ana settled back at her workstation, others registered a generous sigh of pleasure in sharing her friend’s joy.

It seemed a good idea to be looking at something. Files. I counted twelve that needed cleaning up for the ninety-day review, including extortion, an inmate who was stabbed at the Veterans Administration hospital (crime on a government reservation), threatening letters to a software company and three cases of movie stars being harassed by stalkers. The inspectors would pull a document at random and expect it to have met the standards. They would not pay attention to content, only form. The Bureau is all about standards. Standards of behavior. Standards of protocol and language and law.