Стивен Хантер - G-Man

It went from slow to fast. It went from clear to blur. It went from five miles an hour to five hundred miles an hour. Without checking on, but with complete faith in, the loyalty and technique of Clarence Hurt and Ed Hollis, he skipped a pace and came around Johnny’s right, shouldering Sage aside, with his left hand tugged his coat back to free the Colt’s grip from its hiding place, and went to gun. At that precise moment, Johnny himself bucked a fast step beyond Polly. He knew.

Don’t know how, don’t know why, maybe just the animal in him sensing the approach of pure threat, some primordial feeling welling up from wherever that animal slept deep in the brain, but Johnny snatched for something in his pocket as he launched forward. He was drawing.

Johnny was fast. Charles was faster.

Mind to arm, arm to hand, hand to trigger, trigger to hammer, hammer to cartridge, cartridge to powder, powder to bullet, the need to act and the act itself were almost simultaneous. Charles felt energy and purpose coursing through his veins, liberated at last from the long discipline, and instantly alchemized into pure gunfighter’s hunger to win. 157345C, all its safeties carefully disabled, streaked from where it was to where it had to be without thought or motive but only instinct, and Charles fired three times so fast, he seemed to have pulled a Thompson gun from his pants. His finger was a jackhammer against the trigger, firing before the recoil impulse could distract the gun muzzle, itself locked in a grid of hand, wrist, and forearm muscle crushing so tight it could have rendered the steel into pure diamond. He did not shoot well, but he did shoot fast. The first bullet grazed Johnny on the right side, the second went in behind the shoulder, and the third, the killer, off the gun’s inevitable rise, hit Johnny square in the back of the neck, blowing a blister the size of a quarter into that stretch of flesh, continuing through the low brain on a slight upward angle, then exiting rather tidily from just beneath the right eye.

Eons later, it seemed, but in the same second, Hollis fired once, Hurt twice, each of the three a lethal but not immediately effective body shot, each of the three moot. Dillinger was done after Charles’s third bullet had eviscerated most of his right-skull gray stuff.

His knees went, and like a sack of potatoes tossed off a truck, he hit the ground with a thud that could be heard in the instant of silence decreed by the thunderclaps of the six shots delivered in so small a fraction of time. He pitched forward onto the bricks of the alley, and Charles was surprised to see they’d progressed that far along Lincoln, but there the man lay, a pool of red spreading like a flood from his perforations, collecting in a lake of blood next to his head. The hat had fallen away and his feet were oddly pigeon-toed.

Charles knelt by the fallen man, who still breathed out of reflex, and when he saw the now gray lips muttering, bent close to hear the last words.

“I’m not dressed for company,” Johnny said, and if there was a passing then, Charles missed it, as the eternal stillness of the dead just seemed to fall from nowhere and drape the body, no trespassers allowed.

With his left forefinger Charles touched the carotid, that river of blood that united brain and heart running shallowly through the neck, and could feel no pulsations.

“He’s gone,” he said to Hurt, who now leaned close to him, staring at the downed man, the blood, all of it bright, all of it shiny, in the power of the streetlights.

When they rose, they rose into a new world, one without Public Enemy No. 1 in it. It took a second, or possibly two, for this electric news to dazzle the crowd. And then — chaos.

Charles, with Hurt and Hollis as fellow centurions, stood mute above the ruined man, while some kind of crazed energy radiated from the crowd. The magic of the name turned into sheer electricity.

“It’s Dillinger!”

“Jesus Christ, they got Dillinger!”

“Just shot him down, you know, bang, bang .”

“I don’t believe it!”

“Look at him. Big Public Enemy Number One, flat-faced, in an alley.”

“Ever see so much blood?”

“Did they have a machine gun?”

“That tall cop, he’s the one. Man, did he shoot fast.”

“Never gave the poor guy a chance.”

And then it was Purvis stepping into the light — the limelight, actually — and taking over.

“Folks, folks, you have to move back and give us room! Anybody hurt, anybody else shot?”

“This lady here is slightly wounded.”

“Okay, ma’am, just relax, we have medical on the way.”

Other agents flooded in, chasing a few ghouls from Johnny’s body, where they had knelt to dab their handkerchiefs, hat brims, even the tip of a tie, into his blood. The reinforcements formed a cordon, driving against the crowd’s need to see, to be close, to participate in something called history. Sirens rose as the Chicago police, called by half a dozen, poured into the scene en masse.

Zarkovich seemed to have battled his way to Charles.

“You really blasted the sonovabitch. Man, great shooting.”

Then it was Purvis.

“Charles, congratulations. I don’t have to tell you what this means. You’re the best.”

Charles nodded, turned to indicate Hollis and Hurt. “These fellows were in on it too. It’s them as much as me.”

“I’ll make sure the Director knows.”

Someone suggested that Charles and his cohort move away from the body, to a Division car, and there relax and wait for Sam to arrive. Meanwhile, reporters — was it the smell of blood in the air that drew them? — arrived, along with photographers, who angled in for shots, each flashbulb a miniburst of illumination that blanched color from what it touched and created shadow and design and drama and artistic unity where there had been nothing but randomness. The hollowed-out pops of the bulbs firing became the preeminent sound and visual signature of the event as it imploded from reality into journalism.

“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” said Charles to Hurt and Hollis, and he pinched a Camel out of its half-empty pack, slipped it between his lips, and fired it up over his Zippo. The smoke felt great as it rushed into and inflated his lungs, bringing with it just the slightest softening toward blur. He was surprised how weak he felt. The comforting curve of the Ford fender supported him, and he tried to relax, to shake the heebie-jeebies, to eliminate the images of the automatic ripping to life as he pumped the three faster than a burning jackrabbit into Johnny. You don’t want to treasure the killing part, only the shooting. It was good combat shooting — that was a compliment he allowed himself.

He watched as an ambulance nosed its way down the jammed Lincoln to pull up to the scene at the alleyway. Two attendants got out, opening the rear door, but the crowd was too thick and too intense to be penetrated by a gurney, so finally six agents just formed an ad hoc funeral squad and lifted Johnny, still facedown, and lugged him to the ambulance. An arm spilled out loosely, the hand, a big athlete’s hand, now utterly relaxed. The guys got him into the ambulance without much in the way of ceremony or dignity and laid him on the floor. They turned him, awkwardly, so that his empty eyes peered upward. Charles could see vivid stains spattering the white shirt where Johnny’s life fluid had arrived after he’d been deposited on the alley surface. Someone had put the straw hat on his chest, as if at a country funeral.

“You two,” he said to Hollis and Hurt, “go take a last look so you remember it good and will always have a sense of what you done here tonight and take proper pride in it.”

The two slipped off for that rite, just as Sam Cowley emerged from the death site, pushed his way through the crowd, and got to Charles.