Don DeLillo - Running Dog

The bartender filled Selvy's glass. The old woman at the other end of the bar started an argument with one of the two men who were with her. It was her son, evidently. The bartender stared at Moll.

"Headhunter Zombie," she said. "It's coming back to me. This hotel bar someplace-the Dutch Leewards? Where are the Dutch Leewards? You mix in papaya, peach nectar, some dark rum, some more dark rum, some light rum, some lime juice, some shaved ice and I think some honey. Add a dash of bitters."

The first three-round burst took out the bartender and sent glass flying everywhere. Moll felt herself thrown to the floor. There was a second burst, a three-part roar, little explosions everywhere, things flying, and she was aware of Selvy's hand leaving his hip with a gun in it. This had happened earlier, two seconds perhaps, and was just registering, and there was blood also registering, coming down on her from the top of the bar. She flattened herself against the angular surface where the bar and the floor joined, digging in, her whole body, glass registering, crashing everywhere, and the old woman's voice.

Selvy took a head-on position, prone, to avoid presenting too wide a target. He noted muzzle flash. Gun bedded in his hand, he moved his fingertip to the trigger and applied pressure, straight back and unhurriedly, letting out his breath but not completely, just to a point, holding it now as the gun fired, oniy then exhaling fully.

He watched for motion out on the sidewalk. Single gunman, he was almost certain, auto-firing in short bursts. For a brief moment he lost a sense of where the man was, then realized he was standing in the doorway, trying to sort out the chaos inside. AR-18. Severe muzzle climb. Son of a bitch is wearing ear muffs and shooting glasses. Thinks he's on a firing range.

Answering the burst, Selvy fired twice. The whole place was breaking apart with noise, bullets, flying glass. The man who'd been sitting on the step crawled moaning toward the door, trailing blood, one arm limp. The gunman was out of the doorway, moving, hit possibly. Selvy had the distinct impression he'd been hit.

He got to his feet and stepped over the crawling man. He heard a car move off. The old woman lunged at him and he gave her an elbow that drove her to the floor. There was still a roar in his head but the street was quiet and he didn't bother checking for blood. It was academic really, whether he'd hit the man. No concern of his. A technicality.

He returned the.38 to the break-front holster on his belt. Moll came out on the sidewalk. Her expression was comical. She seemed more amazed by the fact that he'd been carrying a gun than by the rest of it, the man spraying the place with automatic fire, the dead and wounded.

"I saw him," she said. "I looked up at the end. What was he wearing? He looked so strange. He stood there trying to see into the room. He was wearing something on his ears and face."

"Tinted glasses. Shooting glasses, for ricocheting bullet fragments. And ear protectors, for noise."

"Who was he? There are people dead in there. What the hell happened?"

"I don't think he was familiar with the weapon. He was letting the muzzle climb when he fired. That weapon's designed to prevent that."

"But who the hell was he? What happened?"

"He had his right elbow at the wrong angle. He had it pointed way down. Your elbow should be straight out, parallel to the ground, firing that particular weapon."

"Jesus, will you stop?" she said. "Will you tell me what happened?"

Her sweater and shirt were covered with the bartender's blood. She stood there trembling. He gave her a crooked little smile and shook his head, genuinely regretful that he wasn't able to bring some light to the situation.

A couple of kids came out of a doorway to approach Selvy near the shattered front of Frankie's Tropical Bar.

"We see the whole thing."

"How much you give us to testify?"

"We make a deal, man."

"It was Patty Hearst with a machine gun."

"No, man, it was Stevie Wonder. You see his headset? He was shooting to the music."

She parked at the very limit of a dead-end street overlooking Rock Creek. It was a warm evening, kids chasing each other in a playground just yards away. The house was red brick, fairly large, attached (how strange, she thought) to a common brown frame house that seemed totally out of place here. How strange and interesting. She approached the brick house, noting that the door-knocker was a bronze eagle.

Lloyd Percival made flattering remarks. He remembered what she'd been wearing on their previous encounter in the corridors of the Senate wing. And commented on the reduced frizz-content of her hair. They sat around a cherrywood cocktail table in a large room filled mostly with period furniture and decorated in spruce green Colonial wallpaper. The first hour was boring, at least for Moll.

"And Mrs. Percival?"

"Spends most of her time back home. Doesn't like Washington. Never has. We've grown apart, I'm afraid. Divorce in progress."

"What does she do?"

"She curls up with the Warren Report. She's been reading the Warren Report for eight or nine years. Nine years, I make it. The full set. Twenty-six volumes. She wears a bed jacket."

"You have two married daughters."

It went on like this. Percival had a second drink. He sat stoop-shouldered in a wing sofa, his deep friendly voice droning on. Even with his beady eyes and his small and somewhat flat-top head, Moll found his presence genial and even serene. He was the kind of man people feel at ease with. Large, shaggy and quietly ironic. She curled up in her chair, enveloped by the room's cozy mood.

"I still don't understand why I didn't have you screened. We screen people like you."

"My fried hair. Disarmed you."

"I know what you really want to talk about."

"Do you?" she said.

"You don't want to talk about my family, or my views on world affairs."

"Don't I?"

"Let me do something to that drink."

"No, it's fine."

"You want to talk about the hearings."

"Actually, no, you're wrong."

"You want to talk about PAC/ORD."

"You're so wrong, Senator."

"Not that I blame you," he said. "They've got mechanisms. Undercover channeling operations. They've got offshoots. It's damn shocking. At this late date, you'd think I'd be impervious to what those people dream up. Not so."

"Senator, the truth is I wouldn't think of asking you to divulge what goes on in closed-door hearings."

"What about this boss of yours?"

"Yes?"

"Grace Delaney," he said. "I hear unflattering reports. She's had dealings with radical groups, among other things."

"A woman with a past. Isn't that what makes us interesting? For men, it's lack of a recorded past that proves so fascinating. Women, no. It's the shadows behind us that do the trick."

"Your own, for instance, I would dearly love to hear about."

"I used to live with Gary Penner. Dial-a-Bomb?"

"I do recall, yes. The name's familiar."

"It should be, Senator. He blew up half your goddamn state about ten years ago."

They shared a laugh over that. Unfolding slowly, Percival's long body rose from the sofa. He shuffled to the liquor cabinet, bringing a bottle of Jack Daniel's back to the cocktail table with him.

"You understand nothing I tell you is to be attributed. It is not only unattributed. It is undocumented, unfounded and unreal. I deny everything in advance. Whoever leaked this stuff to you, whichever committee counsel, is not only breaking the law; he's totally misrepresenting the facts."

"What you're saying, really, Senator, is that you decided at some point that _Running Dog_ is precisely the publication this kind of story cries out for. No one else would touch it since you've no intention of providing the slightest clue to its authenticity."