Michael Walsh - Early Warning

To your left was the crackling hulk of the AMC, another evil infidel pleasure palace, where men and women could watch shameful films together, not segregated but side by side. There was a time when Ben Addison, Jr., enjoyed the company of women and, like every man, had measured his progress as a man by the number of women he’d seduced, or coerced or, once in a while, had even raped. But none of that was his fault-those were just terms, arbitrary definitions, judgments made by another culture on his culture. That was what they had taught him in the joint, the reason why the words of the imam had soothed rather than inflamed, had made him feel better about his own base appetites, although still ashamed, rather than angry. After all, he had a lot to thank the white man for, the removal of that awful guilt he had once felt, felt for so much of his life, to be replaced not by atonement but by righteous anger-by a burning desire for revenge, which had become his own personal version of atonement.

The cop was running toward him. So what if one of his AK’s was gone? The other one would be plenty to take this sucka down…

Byrne knew he had no chance if the shooter got off more than a few shots. Even a spray-painting gangbanger like this guy could get lucky once in a while. Byrne firmly believed in the cop’s adage that a single law enforcement officer with the right training and experience could take down an asshat with a single round left in the cylinder, before said asshat could blow away two little girls, an old woman, the milkman, a couple of cleaning ladies and half the side of the building, but miss his target, with an Uzi or an AK. As politically incorrect as it was to say, there wasn’t a cop in that situation, facing those odds, who didn’t like his chances.

Ben Addison, Jr., liked his chances. He’s seen the way the people fell when he pointed and shot them. What a feeling of power-to merely wish and will and down they went, all his tormentors from childhood, defenseless and helpless, unable to fight back because they were unwilling to fight back, having long ago disarmed themselves morally and emotionally. Whereas he had found the truth in the white man’s jail, where his brothers had come to him with love and mercy and the promise of justice, and then had put a gun in his hand to prove it.

The cop was his. He brought his weapon up into a firing position…

Byrne saw the AK: ghetto sideways, body out of alignment, weight on the wrong foot. His odds had just markedly improved. Closing fast, it wasn’t about firepower now, it was about marksmanship. And aside from blind luck, marksmanship was always the deciding factor in a firefight.

Like a.335 hitter watching a pitcher’s release point and picking up the rotation of the baseball, Byrne could see the shooter’s finger on the trigger, could follow as if in slow motion, every twitch of the muscle ordering the cartridge into position, the firing pin to engage, the powder to ignite, the bullet to shoot down the rifling, spinning, heading straight for him-

His hand on his piece, Byrne dropped to the ground, rolled…came up ready to fire-

As he did, somewhere in the distance, he heard a woman scream.

Ben Addison, Jr., knew that he’d gotten off at least twenty rounds at a single pull. Fuck that bullshit they tried to teach him at the range at the mujahideen camp upstate, the shit about the deep breath and the exhalation and the slow squeezing instead of pulling or jerking-this was a righteous piece he held in his hands, a thing that had never let him down, a death-dealer.

Which is why he missed the son of a bitch. That damn scream. Bitch threw him off. He’d take care of her right after he finished waxing this pig’s infidel ass.

Addison stumbled, caught himself. But he almost dropped his AK and, instinctively, he reached out with his right hand, his firing hand, his trigger finger, to grab the weapon before it clattered to the ground and, in so doing, he forgot another of the lessons the upstate Arabs had tried to teach him, which was never grab the gun barrel after you’d fired.

His voice joined the screams of the woman as the burning gun barrel flayed the skin off his palm.

Just as a parent also knows the sound of a child’s voice, a man can always hear a woman’s screams no matter what the surrounding auditory noise. Byrne had heard plenty of women scream in his life, of course, both privately and professionally, and it was the one sound that a cop, even a homicide dick as he had been for many years, could not abide. It meant a lot of things-pain, suffering, fear, anguish, torture, death-but more than anything it meant this: you were not doing your job. Cops knew that they could barely solve crimes, much less stop them, but they went out on the streets every day hoping to do the latter instead of having to do the former. You couldn’t tell how many people did not die today because of your presence, and you most certainly would never know them if you saw them, but they were there and you knew they were there. They were the good ghosts, the kind you hoped to meet someday, instead of the kind you actually did meet, every day, the ghosts of the people whose lives you were not there to save, the ghosts of the dead, their faces bloodied, their mouths open in agony, the ones who would haunt you, and rightly so, for the rest of your life. Until at last you joined them in whatever hell or purgatory was reserved for cops.

But one thing Byrne knew-the hot dog guy had put his last innocent victim in the grave.

Hope felt the dying building move, shift again. This was, she imagined, what it must be like to be in one of those California earthquakes. They were one of the reasons she and Jack had never gone to Disneyland, her fear of earthquakes. She’d seen enough movies, read enough books, seen enough articles in the Post-Dispatch to know that earthquakes shook buildings, sent the crockery flying, and worst-case scenario, split the ground asunder and swallowed up cars and houses and most certainly small children.

A voice in her ear: “There’s a fire escape out the back.” Danny. “Not on the AMC building itself, but on the one next door. You’re going to have to jump for it.”

Hope wasn’t sure how to process the information. “You mean in the building, right? One of those enclosed things.” In the distance she could hear the sound of gunfire, of wailing sirens, of explosions. This must be what hell is like, she thought.

“No, don’t use them. You won’t make it.”

“But-”

“Listen to me, Hope.” More formal now, the voice in command, in control. “You’re not going to make it. The building isn’t going to make it. It can’t withstand the fire down below. It’s going to collapse, and very soon. You’ve got to get off that roof or you’re all going to die.”

Hope looked around, trying to control her terror. Rory and Emma clung to her, hoping. “But-”

“Listen to me. It’s your only chance. How far is it?”

Hope drew as much breath as she could and looked at her son. “Rory,” she said as calmly as possible, “how far is that fire escape over there? You’re good at these things-tell me. ” she whispered into her cell phone: “Hang on, Danny.”

“No, you hang on, Hope. Say a prayer, and don’t worry.” She could hear the concern in his voice, which she knew, at that moment, was starting to turn to love.

She hadn’t even realized that Rory had left her side when he was back. “That building next door, Mom?” he said, trying not to show his fear. “It’s wrecked.”

Across the country, Danny heard that. “Hope-listen to me. Listen to me. It’s an old building. I’m looking at the plans right now. All they did was add on to it. There’s an old fire escape, a few floors down. You know, the kind you see in the movies. Look for it.”