Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [65]
Now, the cigarette hangs stuck to his lips, and he stands nonplused. It is not a truck just like Jimmy’s—it is Jimmy’s truck, backed into the same spot, and this wet night no different really from that one, except that he is old now. His breath comes hard.
He walks an arc over rutted tracks and goes into a stand of trees, as before. He squats for a moment, the shotgun level across his legs, and he listens, as before, and, as before, he hears: murmurs, the mouth music of a young girl, a sleepy giggle, filling him with desire and despair.
Only several steps separate him from the driver’s side. As he takes the steps the window slowly rolls down. He is not only seen and noted, he is recognized.
The hooded head is turned slightly toward Jeannie and blocks part of her face. Will no one say anything, this time? He feels no rage, this time. Only a blackness in his heart and a thing he must redo. He pumps a shell into the chamber.
But a high-pitched whistle shrieks above his head and he crouches involuntarily and looks above: a golden shower of sparks bouncing light off the fog. He is eye-level with the window. They look at him as though he were the ghost, and he himself is sure of nothing now.
He rises to his full height. He brings up the shotgun and now the air around him, on all sides, is hammered: explosions on all four sides.He feels compressed, unable to breathe freely. The next explosion is his own, fired into the cab of the truck. But no one is inside. The passenger door is open. He looks for them. They are running into the trees, hand in hand, screaming, either in terror or delight, or both. He pumps again and shoots over the hood of the truck, but they have disappeared.
The sky lights up again, cracking, chattering, exploding. He is blinded by the light, deafened by the din. He looks for his spent shells.
In a flash of light, he sees the Spokane cop, in the clearing, in uniform, just standing there, watching him, studying him. This is the one the Indians say is the reincarnation of Jeannie. He pumps another shell into the chamber and puts the shotgun to his shoulder.
It was an outrageous plan, off-the-wall, according to no book, as if we had ever read any of those books. We were not tacticians, not detectives nor sting operatives. What we were was: “See the man, see the woman, domestic dispute at, tail light out, expired plates, rear door ajar at, dead dog at…”
It was the kind of plan behind which, if done well, someone was likely to be shot. Engineered by Odd, who was at best in a dream state, it was the kind of plan in which everyone would get shot.
Odd stood there in the clearing, arms akimbo, under the lights and the pounding of the ingeniously platformed fireworks set up by Calvin and Rap Boy, the Indian pyrotechnos, staring down the killer of his former self, daring him to do it again, on into eternity, if it worked out that way, because that’s as good a hell as any.
Having helped with lighting the fuses, with perfect timing, I must say, I hunkered down behind a tree and now had three choices: shoot Nascine (not an option, really, I’m a terrible shot), watch my partner bite it, or take the running dive and try to knock Odd out of the pellet pattern. I took the dive, ready for anything but where I would land.
Korea. In the dead of winter.
Chosin Reservoir.
A place I had never heard of, yet now was suddenly as well-observed as an ancient curse.
It was cold enough to freeze the blood of the corpses we were using as barricades. There were four of us left alive: Gertz, Fischer, my boyhood pal Tommy Hill, and me, Clarence Washington. Tommy and I had played basketball together, at Overbrook High, Philadelphia. After graduation we went to work on the same day