Death Sentence

2

He had to fill out forms: Federal registration of the two guns. He’d anticipated it and the driver’s license he showed Truett wasn’t his own. It was a New Jersey license that had been among his late brother-in-law’s effects and the three-year license still had two months to go before its expiration. Anyone who traced either of the guns to Robert Neuser of Piermont Road in Tenafly would find a dead end.

He carried the parcel out to his three-year-old Pontiac and placed it on the seat beside the gun-cleaning kit he’d brought with him from New York. He turned the key and backed out of the parking space; it was starting to rain.

It was one of the small towns that had been by-passed by the new Interstate expressways, abandoned by travelers and left to wither: the motels needed paint and announced their vacancies hopelessly; a roadside diner had been boarded up.

It was a warm day for winter but the leafless trees were bleak against grey skies. Christmas buntings sagged across the street. He drove through the center of town and followed the patched road east. It two-laned across prairie farms and brought him at four o’clock to a ramp that merged into the southbound Interstate. He was across the line into Illinois in fifteen minutes’ time and the rush-hour headlights swarmed in the opposite lanes by the time he crossed the suburb boundary between Lincolnwood and Chicago, wipers batting away the drizzle. He was trying to forget the things that had made him shriek.

He left the rain behind at the end of the expressway and drove aimlessly, not quite sure where he was until he passed the Water Tower and the John Hancock skyscraper and the Continental Plaza where he’d stayed his first two nights in Chicago; he made a turn and went along some one-way street to Lake Shore Drive and rolled south with the high-rises on his right. But when he reached the turn-off for his apartment building he went on by; he didn’t want to go home yet. He drove past the lights of the Loop. It was time to have his first look at the South Side.

He drove slowly and impatient cars flashed past him in the outside lanes. There were flat patches of darkness between him and the city. Swamps? Railroad yards? Parks? In the night he couldn’t tell. He stopped at a traffic light and when it changed he made a right turn on Balbo and found himself in the Loop: he’d left the Drive too soon. He jigged left and found himself in a tangle of dead ends butting against the railway switching yards.

On impulse he parked in a side street. It was a district of daytime commerce: everything was shut down and there were few lights. No one walked the curbs.

He unwrapped the parcel and loaded the guns. The Centennial went into his topcoat pocket; the flat .25 automatic into his hip pocket, no bigger nor heavier than a wallet. He put the cleaning kit and the boxes of ammunition under the front seat and locked the car when he got out.

The old rage simmered in him. At street corners he stopped and studied the signs, trying to memorize the intersections: he wanted to learn the city. Holden, Plymouth, Federal, LaSalle. Near the intersection of Michigan and Roosevelt he saw a long covered pedestrian bridge across the rail yards, high in the air and walled with glass. Tall covered stairs at either end gave access to it: a good place for a trap, he thought. He watched for ten minutes. If an innocent entered the trap would a predator follow? The interior of the bridge was visible from the street but the lighting was dim and there were deep shadows between overhead lamps where two or three of them had burned out: the dark places where they liked to accost a mark. At the end of the ten minutes a man in working clothes entered the western staircase and Paul watched him appear at the top and make his long pilgrimage across the bridge but nothing interrupted the solitary journey and afterward Paul moved on, the damp wind biting his ears.

Esther... Carol...

By eight he was back in the car driving south and the quality of the city changed with each block until he was in the ghetto. Funeral Home. Pool Hall. Social Club. Liquors. Cut-Rate Discount. Jesus Saves. He turned off the boulevard and rolled along a residential street parallel to it: three-story tenements, wooden fire-escape stairs hanging from their walls. Young dark people lounged under the street lamps and stared at his car as he crept past. Come on. Come at me. But they only watched, their insolence muted by motionlessness, and he had to drive on.

He made a right turn into a wide boulevard. A bus swished past; there wasn’t much other traffic. He cruised west and the ghetto changed. Soul Food gave way to Tacos and Bodegas. He stopped at a red light and rolled the window down. An El train clattered faintly in the distance; from a bar came the juke-box thumpings of Spanish music. A souped-up car with enormous rear tires growled past him like a mutant insect. In the next block he parked, hungry, and went into a café and ate at the counter: he had discovered Mexican food in Arizona, where he’d got his first gun.

The Centennial was a familiar weight in his coat pocket; he’d felt vulnerable the past few days, empty-pocketed in the city.

The chili relleno was good; he washed it down with beer. He paid the fat woman and went back to the street. It was coming up on nine o’clock and getting colder. A Christmas banner across a drugstore said “Feliz Navidad” and three laughing men came out of a bar, one of them carrying a six-pack.

He got back in the car frustrated: he didn’t know the city well enough. He drove in any direction, prowling.

He had no idea where he was but there was a map in the glove compartment and eventually he’d consult it and find his way home; in the meantime he had to explore.

It was a bar on a dark street somewhere a bit north and west of the center of things: through the window it looked like a boisterous drunk crowd and not far down the street two men in shabby coats sat on porch steps watching the bar. Paul had only a glimpse of them when he drove past but it was as if he read their thoughts and when he reached the corner he turned out of their sight and searched for a place to park the car. He found a spot a block away and locked the doors and circled the block on foot; he stopped at the corner and waited while several cars drove by. When he looked past the corner he saw the front of the bar and if he stepped out a pace he could see the two young men on the stoop; he did it once and then faded back because he didn’t want to alert them. They were still sitting there, passing a bottle back and forth between them — probably wine. But they were young and wiry under the tattered coats and the immobility of their features had given them away to him instantly: he knew them, he’d made a study of their kind and Chicago was no different from New York when it came to that subspecies.

He fixed the plan in his head and then stepped out into plain sight on the curb. He walked as if he were a little drunk; he didn’t exaggerate it but he moved with slow deliberate care, a bit owlish, not staggering. He looked both ways and crossed the street briskly and tripped over the curb mounting the sidewalk; he made a show of gathering his dignity and went into the bar. He hadn’t had to look at the two men on the stoop to know they’d been watching him.

There was a loud crush of celebrants. They were in shabby booths and three-deep at the bar. It was a plain saloon, at least fifty years old by the look of it and unchanged from its origins except for the blown-up photographic posters on the walls: Brendan Behan and Eugene O’Neill and someone whose face Paul didn’t recognize — probably an Irish Republican patriot from the 1920s; the room dripped with Irish accents and there was no mistaking the lilt of the ebullient shouts that exploded from the knot of fat men at the far end of the bar. A barmaid in a red wig elbowed past him with a tray of beers.

He stationed himself near the window where the two men across the street could see his back. He ordered ginger ales and drank them quickly, three in succession, and was buttonholed by two loudmouths who demanded that he settle an argument about Catfish Hunter. He pleaded ignorance and was flooded immediately with information or misinformation about baseball. When he judged enough time had passed he went back through the crowd, waited his turn and relieved himself in the men’s room. He washed the sweat off his hands and threaded his way to the front door fighting down the fear inside him: he waved drunkenly to his two conversational companions and lurched outside, all but colliding with a laughing couple on their way in.

He looked one way and then the other, a man drunk enough to have trouble remembering where he’d parked his car. Sweat slicked his palms and he rubbed them on the cloth inside his coat pockets. He started off in the wrong direction, brought himself up with anger and stumbled back toward the corner.

In the edge of his vision the two young men on the stoop sat up a bit. Their hats turned, indicating their interest in his progress.

Paul stopped at the corner and studied all four streets in turn with the great concentration of the inebriate: then he stepped carefully off the curb and weaved toward the far side, maintaining his balance with visible effort.

Inside the drunk’s act he was afraid. You don’t have to try it. You don’t have to die. Don’t come after me.

But the fear was on his tongue. It was familiar terror, an old acquaintance, a frightening thing compounded of their intentions and his own: he was afraid of them but afraid of himself as well, afraid of what he knew he would do. It was something he sensed but still did not understand.

He knew they wouldn’t leave him alone. They’d had that bar staked out for hours waiting for a mark like him; they wouldn’t get a better shot if they waited a week. A lone drunk lurching into a dark street trying to remember where he’d parked his car...

He breathed deeply and regularly to calm himself. Into shadow now and he stopped on the edge of the curb pretending anger because he couldn’t find his car. He had his back to them but he knew they were there because their silhouettes obscured the splash of streetlight when they reached the corner.

He stooped and tried to fit his key into the door of a car but it was the wrong car and he swore an oath — loud enough to reach the two men’s ears — and gave the offending car a petulant kick and went on, bending down to peer close at each parked car he passed.

When they came for him they came in a rush and one of them had the wine bottle upraised, ready to strike at the back of Paul’s skull; the other had a folding knife opened to rip upward with the extended blade.

He heard them in plenty of time but the fear paralyzed him momentarily; he moved slower than he should have — he didn’t know the gun yet, he should have allowed more time, but they were nearly on top of him when he crouched and turned, stretching his arm out.

It stopped them in their tracks. They had a good look at his undrunk eyes and the black revolver: they knew what hit them.

The noise was intense, earsplitting; the gun crashed against the heel of his hand.

The man with the wine bottle bent double. Paul shifted his aim and shot the knife man in the chest.

He barely heard the bottle shatter on the pavement. He shot both men in the heads while they were falling because they had to be dead so that they couldn’t identify him.

In a chilly sweat of terror he staggered away.