Guns

Seven

The diner is here and now.

It is high noon in New Jersey and the sun is directly overhead when Jeanine pulls the red Pinto into the parking lot. There is a huge trailer truck parked over on the right, some distance away from the diagonal slashes painted onto the black asphalt in front of the diner. A smaller truck occupies two of the front-side spaces, and there are a handful of pleasure cars parked at angles on either side of it. A hand-lettered sign reads OPEN 24 HOURS. The sign is three feet high by six feet long and it is supported by a pair of high aluminum poles in front of the diner. It is the sign that caught Colley’s eye when they were still a block away from the place.

On the right of the diner is a store selling automobile appliances, but it is closed; this is Sunday. On the left of the diner is an empty lot. There are a lot of used tires in the lot. Aside from the tires, the lot is scrupuluously clean. No tin cans, no trash, just the tires lying alone on their sides or piled on top of each other. It is almost as if the tires are out to pasture. The sky beyond the empty lot is clear and blue, there is not a cloud anywhere in sight. As Colley comes out of the car, he smells cooking grease. He has not had anything but a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee early this morning. The smell of the grease almost makes him ill now. He considers going back to the car, hell with it, find a restaurant doesn’t smell like this one. But the sign is huge above him, and it says OPEN 24 HOURS and that means the cash register inside there will probably be brimming full, and he wants enough money from this one job to last them all the way to Florida. He does not want to have to do a while string of jobs, especially not in the goddamn South.

He has no plan as yet. He does not know this place, he has not cased it. His normal M.O., even before he began working with Jocko, was to case a joint thoroughly before he hit, maybe even do two or three dry runs before the day of the job. That way, there were no surprises. Except for last night, when there were two surprises, both of them left-handed, both of them running out of the back room of the liquor store with guns in their fists. But normally, you case a joint, you learn the layout by heart, you plan your escape route, nothing’s going to happen unless somebody gets dumb while you’re inside and you’re forced to use the gun. The way he’d been forced to use the gun last night because that bastard cop opened fire first.

The diner is all aluminum and glass, there are steps on either side of a small entrance cubicle. He chooses the steps on the right, closest to where Jeanine is waiting in the red Pinto. He opens the entrance door and sees first a telephone on the wall opposite and then the cigarette machine, and then another glass door leading into the main body of the diner. The place is air-conditioned, a wave of cool air rushes out at him as he opens the door and steps from the entrance cubicle into the diner, as though he is moving from some sort of decompression chamber. Inside the diner, directly to the right of the entrance door, is the cash register. He walks past it without seeming to give it a second glance.

There are booths on the front wall of the diner, on either side of the entrance door. Red leatherette. Directly opposite the entrance door, running along the rear of the diner, is the counter, red leatherette stools ranged in front of it, mirror behind it. Pair of burly truck drivers at one end of the counter, both of them trying to make time with a skinny brunette waitress in a white uniform. Other end of the counter, guy in blue pants and shirt, probably the driver of the smaller truck outside. In the booths, four couples, two of them with children. Colley takes a seat at the counter. The cash register is directly behind him, he can see it in the mirror and he can hear the cashier talking into the telephone that rests on one end of the counter enclosing her space. She is talking to someone who is probably her husband. She is telling him how to work the oven so that it will clean itself. She is instructing him as to which knobs to turn and which buttons to push and which switches to activate. She speaks in a high whiny nasal voice and her instructions are impatient, as though she is talking to someone with either a very low I.Q. or very poor finger dexterity. Colley dislikes her at once. It will be a pleasure to shove the Walther P-38 in her face.

The brunette waitress knows Colley has taken a stool at the counter, but she is in the middle of a story to the two horny truck drivers, and she is not about to let a customer intrude on her private life. She finishes the story and both truck drivers burst out laughing and she stands there grinning at them, basking in the accolade of their laughter. Then she nods, having just played the Palladium to thunderous applause, and still grinning, walks to where Colley is sitting midway down the counter, his back to the cash register. On the telephone, the cashier is asking the dummy on the other end whether he understood the part about locking the oven, he has to make sure the oven is locked.

“Good afternoon, sir,” the waitress says.

“Good afternoon,” Colley says.

“Care to see a menu?”

“Please,” he says.

He has no intention of doing the job while there are three truck drivers in the place, especially when two of them have been coming on with the scrawny brunette. All he needs is a pair of guys trying to show off for a girl, maybe making a grab for the gun when he shoves it in the cashier’s face. He’s not worried about the couples sitting in the booths. The two couples with children are just going to sit there and hope nobody in the family gets hurt, and the other two couples are an old man and his wife sitting in the booth closest to the register, and further down the aisle a teenage kid and his girl. Colley is only worried about the truck drivers. Not so much about the one sitting alone at the counter; he’ll probably mind his own business once the gun comes out. But those other two still laughing at the joke the waitress told.

The waitress puts a menu on the counter in front of Colley, and then sets down a glass of water and a paper napkin and utensils, and then hurries on down the counter to where her enthralled audience is waiting. She leans close to the one sitting at the very end of the counter, big guy wearing a hat with some kind of button on it, and she whispers something to him, and the guy bursts out laughing, and the other guy says, “What? What’d she say?” and she whispers it all over again to him, and he starts laughing too. Then he stands up and stretches and Colley thinks he’s about to leave, but instead he heads for the men’s room. The minute he’s gone, the one with the button on his hat engages the waitress in some serious whispered conversation.

Another waitress comes out of the kitchen. She’s a country girl, plain face, straight brown hair, thick figure. She comes through the break in the counter on Colley’s left and carries a loaded tray to where the old man and his wife are sitting in the booth closest to the cashier. She takes eggs off the tray, and a plate of toast, and two cups of coffee, and she asks the old man if there will be anything else. The old man looks at the food and then asks if she has any jam or marmalade. The waitress says she’ll get some, and comes back through the break in the counter again and gets the marmalade and the jam from a shelf under the counter, and comes past Colley again and says to the old man, chirpily, “There you are, sir.” The old man thanks her. He’s a big guy, must have been a powerhouse when he was young, broad shoulders, thick chest, huge hands. His hair is white now, and he’s wearing eyeglasses, and his hands shake a little when he picks up his food. Down the counter, the third truck driver calls for his check, and the country-girl waitress brings it to him. Good, Colley thinks. Now let’s get rid of the other two.

The brunette is back.

“Have you decided yet, sir?” she asks.

“I’ll have a pair of eggs over lightly,” Colley says. “Cup of coffee and a toasted English.”

“Bacon or sausage with the eggs?”

“Does it come with them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll have the sausage,” he says, and then immediately says, “No, make it the bacon.” Every time he orders sausage with his eggs, he expects them to bring Italian sausage, and then when they come out with those small skinny links, he’s disappointed. This has happened to him maybe fifty times in his life, he orders sausage and then is disappointed. This time he remembers and catches himself. Trouble is, he doesn’t much care for bacon. Maybe he should have told her no sausage, no bacon. But the girl is already on her way into the kitchen, pushing open the swinging door. He sees the short-order cook, guy with a beer-barrel belly, wearing a white T-shirt, sweat stains around the armpits and across his chest. Got on a little white hat, not a chef’s hat, thing looks like a soldier’s overseas cap, only in white. Tilted on his forehead. The door swings shut.

“You being taken care of?” the other waitress asks.

“Yeah, thanks,” Colley says. Behind him, the truck driver who’d been sitting alone at the counter is paying his check. The cashier asks him, “Was everything all right, sir?” and the guy nods and takes a toothpick from a glass container on the counter. The cashier rings up the check, money comes tumbling down the cash register chute into the small metal receiving dish. Colley wishes he could see into the open drawer of the register, but the mirror isn’t angled that way. “Have a nice day now,” the cashier says. “You too,” the truck driver says, and goes out.

In the mirror, Colley can see him buying cigarettes at the cigarette machine in the entrance cubicle. The door to the kitchen swings open again. The short-order cook is laughing and the brunette waitress has a grin on her face; she missed her calling, she should have been a stand-up comic. Down at the other end of the diner, the truck driver is coming out of the men’s room, fiddling with his zipper. Colley is willing to bet eight-to-five that the guy did not wash his hands afterwards. Colley always washes his hands afterwards, even if he’s only taken a leak. But he has noticed over the years that most guys don’t bother washing their hands afterwards. He has also noticed that most guys don’t even bother flushing the goddamn toilet afterwards.

In Sing Sing the cops would get mad as hell you didn’t flush the toilet afterwards. Prison movies, all the prison security officers are called screws by the cons. Colley gets up to Sing Sing, he discovers the cops are called cops or pigs, just like outside. Fuckin pig is a fuckin pig no matter where he works. One cop up there, they called him the Shadow, he’d sneak up on a man before you knew what was happening. “The Shadow knows,” he’d say, and give you a shot with his fuckin stick, the end of it, poke you with it hard. If he found a guy walking away from a toilet without flushing it, he was on that man in a minute, sneaked up on him like a whisper. “The Shadow knows,” he’d say, and ram that fuckin stick in your arm, leave it black-and-blue for a month. Even so, guys up there didn’t flush the toilets. Same as outside here.

The truck driver who came out of the toilet says, “Well, you ready to roll, Frank?”

“I was asking Jill here she maybe felt like dancing tonight,” Frank says; he’s the one with the button on his hat.

“What makes you think we’ll be back tonight?” the other guy says.

“We’re only going far as Washington, ain’t we?”

“I thought we’d maybe stay over.”

“I rather come back here, go dancing with Jill,” Frank says.

“He’s a good dancer, he tells me,” Jill says. “Is that true, Eddie?”

“I never danced with him,” Eddie says, and the jerks start laughing again.

Eddie and Frank, Colley thinks. Get the fuck out of here, Eddie and Frank. Get the rig rolling, lots of miles to cover before you get to Washington.

“So what’s it going to be?” Jill asks. “Are we on for tonight or what?”

“What time you quit?” Frank says.

“Five o’clock.”

“I’ll call you before then. Soon’s I see what kind of time we’re making.”

“You made some pretty good time right here in the diner,” Jill says, and they all laugh again. She is writing out the check as she says this, the girl really missed her calling. She doesn’t even look up at them, she just keeps writing, and they’re practically rolling on the floor laughing at her remark. “Here you go, boys,” she says. “Who’s taking it this time?”

“I think it’s my turn,” Eddie says, and takes the check from her hand.

Frank gets off the stool like he is disembarking from a rodeo horse. He stretches his arms over his head, showing his belly when his shirt rides up. “I’ll call you before five,” he says.

“I’ll be waiting,” Jill says.

They laugh again, for no reason this time, and the two men come down the aisle and stop at the cash register behind Colley. He sees them in the mirror as they pay the check. “Was everything all right, gentlemen?” the cashier says, and Eddie says, “Just dandy,” and Frank says, “Best food in all Jersey,” and the cashier rings up the check and chirps, “Well, thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed it. Have a nice day now.”

Jeanine is sitting outside in the red Pinto. Colley is afraid the truck drivers will see her sitting there and wonder what the hell she’s doing sitting there while her husband or whoever is inside the diner. He realizes he should have ordered sandwiches to go. Not something to eat inside here. So if anybody got suspicious of Jeanine, they’d think he was in here buying something for her to eat in the car. In the mirror behind the counter, he sees the truck drivers opening the door and stepping out into the entrance cubicle. Frank, the one with the button on his hat, stops at the pay telephone on the wall, and automatically feels in the coin-return chute to see if there is any change in it, cheap bastard. They both go outside. Colley waits until he hears their truck starting, hears the grinding of gears, the hiss of air brakes, the truck gearing up again as it enters the highway, and then the sound of its engine fading into the distance.

It is time to make his move.

“Eggs over lightly,” Jill says, and puts the plate down in front of him, together with a second plate on which there’s the toasted English. “You did say bacon, didn’t you?” she asks.

“Yeah, bacon.”

“Coffee’s coming,” she says, and turns to the big urn on the wall to the left of the swinging door to the kitchen, and draws a cup, and puts it on the counter next to the plate of eggs. “Cream and sugar?” she asks.

“Please,” Colley says.

Behind him there is nobody at the cashier’s counter; he wants to make his move immediately before a traffic jam starts. Jill picks up the sugar container from where it’s sitting two stools down and carries it to Colley and sets it down on the counter in front of him. To the left of the coffee urn there’s a small tray of creamers and she reaches for two of these now, her back to Colley. He is about to turn on the stool, and get to his feet, and throw the gun in the cashier’s face. He is almost starting into motion when the swinging door to the kitchen flies open and the short-order cook comes out. He looks Colley directly in the face, and smiles.

“Hot back there,” he says, and wipes his forearm across his upper lip. “Eggs okay?” he asks.

“Yeah, fine,” Colley says, and picks up his fork. He does not want to throw down on the cashier while the short-order cook is out front. He does not know who the guy is, but sometimes in these small diners the cook is also the owner, and he doesn’t want to have to shoot a man trying to protect what’s in the till.

Jill is back now, she puts the two creamers in front of Colley. He rips the foil top off one of them and pours the contents into his coffee. Jill reaches into the pocket of her uniform, takes out a package of cigarettes, discovers it’s empty, crumples it, and puts it in an ashtray. Then she comes through the break in the counter and goes outside to the cigarette machine. In the mirror, Colley sees her looking out at the parking lot as she rips the red cellophane strip off the top of the package. When she comes inside again, she says to the short-order cook, “Blonde sitting outside there in a red Pinto.”

“Yeah?” the cook says.

“That’s my wife,” Colley says immediately. “She wasn’t hungry.”

“She should come in, cool off,” Jill says.

“It’s cool in the car,” Colley says.

“Cool in here, too,” the cook says. “Except back there by the stove.”

“We didn’t know it was air-conditioned,” Colley says.

“Sign right on the door,” the cook says.

“We didn’t see it.”

He’s getting into an argument with the fuckin cook. What business is it of his whether Jeanine comes in or stays out or climbs up the OPEN 24 HOURS sign and throws a moon at the highway?

“You working half a day, or what?” the country-girl waitress says to the cook. She has just taken an order from one of the families at the other end of the diner, and she’s back with her pad now. The cook takes the order slip from her, and looks at it, and goes back into the kitchen. Behind the counter, Jill is smoking her cigarette with obvious pleasure. The other waitress goes over to her and says, “Let me have a drag, huh?”

As Jill hands her the cigarette, Colley swings around on the stool, facing the cashier, and steps out with his right foot, and with his right hand he reaches into the shirt where the two buttons above the belt are unbuttoned. He feels the stock of the Walther, it is familiar to his hand, he knows the Walther, he has owned many of them in his lifetime. He pulls the gun out of his waistband and thumb-cocks the hammer even though he knows it can be operated by pulling the trigger. The cashier is dialing the telephone, he figures she’s calling her dummy husband again to make sure he locked the oven. “Put that down,” he says, and she immediately puts the receiver back on the cradle. Her eyes are wide, her lip is trembling, he figures she is about to scream. He uses Jocko’s words. “See this?” he says, thrusting the gun toward her. “I’ll shoot your face off you don’t open the register fast. Now do it!”

The cashier is opening the register as he takes a step to the right, figuring to reach in over the counter and clean out the drawer. He catches her eye, he sees that her eye is looking past his left shoulder, and he whirls immediately and throws the gun on the country-girl waitress who already has the palm of her hand on the swinging door and is ready to push it open.

“Hold it right there!” Colley says, and the girl freezes, and now the place is deathly still because everyone in it knows there’s a gunman at the cashier’s counter. He reaches in over the counter and pulls stacks of bills from the cash drawer, one compartment at a time. Twenties, a good hefty stack, and then tens, and fives, and singles. He is reaching for the rolls of coins at the front of the cash drawer when the trouble comes. It comes from the least expected place; this weekend is just full of surprises. It comes from the old man.

He is standing, he is six feet four inches tall, the old fart, and he has the shoulders of a lumberjack and the chest of a wrestler and hands that could pull apart the jaws of an alligator, like that guy on the cover of the men’s magazine where Colley read about being lost in the jungle. The old man’s fists are already bunched, he is going to be a hero. He is seventy-five if he’s a day, but he’s still a big man who remembers when his enormous body surged with strength and power. His hands are shaking as he approaches, there are tears streaming down his face from behind the eyeglasses. He is crying for his lost youth and his lost power, he is crying because he’s lived honestly all his life and cannot now condone this criminal act, he is crying because he suspects his foolhardy intervention may well result in his death. He is maybe crying for any one of these reasons or for all of these reasons — Colley only knows the man constitutes a threat.

Colley has killed a cop.

This old fart coming at him with his fists clenched and tears running down his face, closing the gap between them, coming closer and closer as Colley stuffs three rolls of quarters into his hip pocket, this old fart means nothing at all to him, he will waste him without remorse if the man tries to stop him.

He says, “Hold it, mister!” and just then the country-girl waitress lets out a scream could wake the dead in every cemetery on Long Island, and Colley looks away for just an instant, and that’s enough time for the old man to clamp his fingers on Colley’s left wrist. “Let go,” he says to the old man, and the swinging door to the back of the place opens and out comes the sweating short-order cook, and he’s got a cleaver in his hand, he’s going to protect his turf, he comes out of the kitchen like a fuckin Chinaman waving a cleaver in a movie about gold-rush camps.

Colley does not want to shoot the old man.

But the old man is clinging tightly to his wrist and the cook is coming through the break in the counter now, the cleaver in his hand, and there are a lot of people making noise now — the old man’s wife in the booth next to the cashier’s counter yelling “Harry, no, please, Harry,” and down the aisle the girl with the teenage kid screaming like she’s at a Stones concert. Colley can see past the old man and down the aisle to where one of the families is sitting in a booth and he sees a little boy with brown eyes and blond hair and he remembers his mother telling him that when he was small he used to have blond hair, didn’t start changing to brown till he was five or six.

“Harry, let go of my fuckin hand,” he says to the old man.

The old man is surprised to hear his name. He lets go of Colley’s wrist and peers at him as though he’s possibly made a mistake — is this someone he knows? If not, why has the man used his name so familiarly? Colley swings away from him and toward the cook, who handles the cleaver like it’s a fly swatter, doesn’t the son of a bitch know it’s a deadly weapon? He’s bringing it up over his head to swat Colley dead, what he doesn’t know is that Colley’s killed a cop, Colley has nothing to lose. “Mister,” Colley says, and he is about to say “you are making a big mistake,” but the cook is upon him, and Colley fires the gun instinctively and reflexively.

The slug takes the cook in the shoulder, he spins around from the force of it, and slams against the counter. The old man’s mouth opens wide when he hears the explosion. He seems about to take a step toward Colley again, but he thinks it over and quickly changes his mind. Nobody’s moving. The cleaver is on the floor. The cook is bent over one of the stools now, and blood is streaming down his arm the way it was Jocko’s last night.

“Okay now,” Colley says.

He backs toward the door.

“Okay,” he says again.

He opens the door and runs outside. Jeanine has already started the car. He knows that what he should do is run for the car, get into the car. But the car is headed for Florida in the month of August and Colley doesn’t want that kind of heat, and he doesn’t want the kind of heat that will come the minute Jill tells the cops they’re driving a red Pinto, probably at the window right this minute copying down the license-plate number, he is tempted to turn and take a look. He does not want to be in a car that’s halfway or maybe all the way identified, and he does not want to be going to Florida in the month of August, but most of all, he does not want to be with Jeanine any more. Jeanine scares the hell out of him. Jeanine drives with her legs wide-spread, the pleated white skirt high on her thighs, and he can smell brimstone rising from her cunt, and the whiff reminds him of the devil’s laughter in the kitchen, Jocko bleeding out his life — no, he does not want to go with Jeanine to Florida or anyplace else on earth.

He begins running in the opposite direction.

He does not even hesitate to see what kind of look is on her face. He is running northward, and he knows she cannot turn the car anything but southward once she pulls out of that parking lot, there’s a divider separating the highway lanes, that’s it, my dear. He runs across the southbound lane now, the traffic is light, this is Sunday, and he leaps the divider and then crosses the northbound lane and runs into a patch of woods on the other side of the highway. He does not know where he is in New Jersey but he suspects he is not close to any sprawling metropolis like New York or even Newark, where his Aunt Tessa lives. As he enters the woods, he is reminded again of that story in the men’s magazine, the guy lost in the jungle, and he wonders if civilization will be his Aunt Tessa’s house in Newark, New Jersey. He knows one thing for certain. He is not going to any fuckin Fort Myers, Florida, he is going to New York City, man, the big apple, the only fuckin town in the entire universe. He is going to cut through these woods parallel with the road, and he is going to come out of them maybe a mile north of where he went in, and he is going to stick out his thumb and head for New York. He suddenly bursts out laughing, thinking of Jeanine starting up the Pinto and waiting for him to get in but instead he runs off in the opposite direction. He wonders if they’ll tie Jeanine in with the robbery, throw her in the local hoosegow. Jersey cop comes over to her, “Well, well, miss, so you was an accomplice in a holdup, huh, miss?”

Laughing, Colley runs through the woods.

He is happier than he has been since straddling that fence in the Bronx and thumbing his nose at the cops chasing him. Not really thumbing it, of course, but letting them know just what he thought of them by hanging there against the sky and daring them. He is telling Jeanine what he thinks of her now. Big fuckin Amazon scaring him to death with that laugh boiling up from her gut, where’d she get that fuckin laugh? Probably had a hoodoo inside her, made her stab Jocko that way in a million places, broke the fuckin knife on his head, Jesus! Leaves are slapping his face as he runs. There are insects in the woods, and they are biting him, he is not used to this shit. He is a city boy, yessir, born and raised in that city across the river there, and that is where he’s going, back to the city, back to where he will be safe again, never mind Fort Myers. She loves Fort Myers so much, let her go to Fort Myers, this kid’s going to New York, yessir, going to make his fame and fortune there. Maybe go in the pimping trade with Benny, sign on as an apprentice, his job’d be breaking in the new girls.

He laughs again.

He is having a gay old time in these fuckin woods even though the leaves are slapping him and the insects are biting him. He is free of her, he has shaken that blond hoodoo off his back, he has turned her loose in the world where she can stab anybody comes near her, just so long as it’s not him. Stab them all, sister, give it to them. Just stay far away from yours truly, Joe College with the crew cut. He laughs at the idea of wearing a crew cut. He is already planning on dropping in on old Benny, knocking on the door, maybe the Jewgirl opens it, this time she doesn’t recognize him. She’s still wearing the Arab thing, she looks out at him, doesn’t recognize him with the crew cut. Wouldn’t recognize him anyway cause Benny’s got her stoned to the gills, Benny comes to the door, looks out, Colley says, “How you do, sir, I’m working my way through college selling heroin.” Benny busts out laughing cause till that minute he don’t realize the guy with the crew cut is Colley.

He has probably run about three or four blocks through the woods now, he can’t be sure. If back there at the diner they have latched on to Jeanine, they are probably asking her questions about who she is and who the man is held up the place and shot the cook, fuckin dope with his cleaver over his head, and that will give Colley time. Time is what he needs. Time to run the mile or so in these woods and come out someplace further north and then thumb a ride to the city. He keeps running until he is exhausted, and then he drops to the ground and lies there breathing hard. In a little while he sits up and begins pulling bills from his pockets, the money he stole from the diner. There is three hundred and twelve dollars, including the three rolls of quarters. He figures that is not too bad. Counting the sixteen he already had, that makes three twenty-eight.

The woods are very still.

He notices all at once that the woods are very still, and he remembers again the story he read in the men’s magazine. His heart is thudding heavily in his chest, he can hear each separate beat, can feel his own pulse in his ears, and is fearful for a moment that everything will remain forever in this hyped-up, slowed-down state. Everything will be a robbery forever, nothing will ever return to normal, they even will bury him in excruciating detail, a rose will fall into his open grave in twisting slow motion, hanging on the air, hanging, hanging, and finally dropping onto the black coffin top. He can hear his watch ticking noisily in the stillness of the woods, and then he hears the snapping of twigs and sees the leaves parting ahead an instant before the beast comes into the clearing.

The beast is a German shepherd, jowls pulled back over his fangs, growl rumbling up from his gut and into his throat. He runs three feet into the clearing, there is a second and a half of heart-stopping terror during which Colley scrambles to his feet, and then the beast is airborne. He hurls himself at Colley with jaws wide, saliva dripping from his fangs; he is all head and teeth. Colley throws his right arm up, bent at the elbow, the forearm across his chin and throat. The jaws close on his arm. He does not feel pain at first, he is too frightened. He sees only the beast’s black nose dripping snot, and he sees the black-edged jowls and the teeth closing on his arm, joining on his arm, and he sees the sudden gush of blood, but he feels no pain for an instant.

And then the pain strikes.

It is excruciating, dozens of sharp needles penetrating his flesh, each a separate bleeding wound, each blinding in its intensity, he is certain he will faint. He wants to reach for the Walther in his belt, reach into the open two buttons and pull the gun free in a cross-draw, but the beast is fastened onto his right arm, he is going to faint, the fuckin beast will eat him alive in the jungle. He knows he is toppling backward and falling to the ground, and he knows this is the wrong thing to do, knows the beast will go for his throat, bite into his jugular, send his blood spurting up onto the floor of the forest. But he is helpless to stop his backward fall, the beast must weigh at least two hundred pounds, he is the biggest dog Colley has ever seen in his life, and he will not let go of Colley’s arm, he is chewing on it like a fuckin soup bone, and blood is flying in the air as Colley falls to the bright-green ground, flailing his arm, trying to shake the dog loose.

He cannot reach the gun in his right-hand pocket, he cannot reach the .32 Smith & Wesson, which gun he doesn’t like anyway. He fumbles with the bottom of the sports shirt hanging out of his trousers, trying to lift it up over the butt of the Walther, but the dog is kicking at him with his back legs, Colley is going to faint, he feels his life gushing out of him between the beast’s jaws. The butt of the gun is facing in the wrong direction, he grasps nothing but air at first. He has managed to get the shirt up over the butt, and now he tries to twist his left hand so that he can pull the fuckin gun out of his belt, turn it, twist it somehow into firing position before the dog kills him. He knows the dog will kill him. The only thing that can save his life is the gun.

The dog lets go of his arm for a moment, and the pain is instantly eased, and then the dog is snapping at his face and biting at his shoulder, climbing all over him as he rolls over the green floor of the forest, staining the grass and the weeds with blood. The butt of the Walther is in his hand now, his left hand, he says under his breath, “Here, you son of a bitch!” and shoves his hand and the gun into the dog’s open mouth as the dog comes at him again. The dog smells of horror and of death, the dog smells of hair and shit. He squeezes the trigger inside the dog’s mouth just as the jaws clamp shut on his wrist. The explosion takes off the back of the dog’s head, fur and bone and blood flying into the air, sunlight glistening on them. It is like the back of the cop’s head. He watches in fascination. He is afraid the dog will bite his left hand off at the wrist, but there is almost no head left to the dog now, the nine-millimeter slug has taken away half of that fuckin triangular head and the jaws have gone lax and Colley pulls back his hand as the dog slides in slow motion to the forest floor. Colley fires at him again, and then again. He keeps firing. Something warns him that he is wasting ammunition, the cartridges for the Walther and the .32 are still back there in the glove compartment of the Pinto. But he keeps firing into the lifeless body of the beast nonetheless, watching patches of fur and gristle and blood fly into the air. The gun clicks empty. He throws the gun at the dog. He has never even been able to throw a ball straight with his right hand, and this is his left hand and he is throwing a gun, not a ball, and of course he misses. He kicks out at the dog, his foot colliding with the snot-running black snout, the back of the dog’s head gone, he wants to kick out all the dog’s fuckin teeth. He keeps kicking at the head.

Then he collapses to the ground, and rolls over onto his back and tries to catch his breath. He is afraid he will choke to death if he does not start breathing normally soon. His left wrist isn’t bleeding at all, the dog barely had his teeth on it before the Walther went off inside his mouth. But his right arm is bleeding very badly. His right arm looks like a piece of meat in a butcher shop, his right arm looks as raw as Jocko’s throat did when Colley looked into it earlier tonight. The dog’s teeth were easily as sharp as the knife Jeanine used, and Colley is certain he will die the way Jocko died, leaking blood from the hundreds of teeth slashes on his arm. He knows he has to stop the blood, and he decides he should take off his shirt and wrap it around his arm. But he is trembling so hard and fighting so painfully to catch his breath that all he can do is lie on his back on the trampled weeds, his eyes closed, the sunlight flickering on his lids.

The sun goes out.

He thinks he is dead.

He thinks his heart has stopped beating, his heart actually does stop beating in that instant when the blackness closes on his lids. He opens his eyes at once. The man standing there against the sun, blocking the sun, is wearing dirt-stained bib overalls, no shirt under them. His arms are long and thin and covered with hair. He is holding a shotgun in his hands, the barrel cradled on the palm of his left hand, the stock in the crook of his right arm, his right index finger inside the trigger guard and curled around the trigger. Colley looks first at the shotgun and then up at the man’s face.

It is thin and gaunt, the cheeks are sunken, there is a four-day beard bristle on the man’s jaw, the man looks like the fuckin rednecks Colley has seen in the movies — but this is New Jersey, what is a redneck doing this far north? The man’s eyes are a pale blue. Looking up into his eyes, Colley can hardly see any whites at all, the blue seems to consume the eyeballs, Colley is sure it is a trick of the light in the forest. But as the man continues to stare down at him, his mouth unmoving, his eyes unflickering, Colley begins to think this is not a man at all but is instead Death, the same Death ticking in the unseen clock in Jocko’s apartment, the same Death that’s been hounding him since nine o’clock last night when he shot and killed a fuckin police officer in a liquor store in the Bronx.

He does not know what Death wants of him, except his life.

The man suddenly reverses the shotgun, grasping the barrel in both hands. “You son of a bitch,” he says softly, and swings the stock at Colley’s head.

There is a clock ticking.

The side of Colley’s face is throbbing where the shotgun stock collided with his cheekbone. The Smith & Wesson has been taken from his side pocket, he is aware at once of the absence of its bulk. The other gun, the Walther, is probably still in the woods. He feels suddenly naked. He is lying on the floor in one corner of a wooden shack. His arm is crusted with dried and drying blood. No one has cleaned it, no one has dressed it. A woman is sitting beside him and above him in a straight-backed wooden chair. She is in her late fifties, her eyes are blue, her hair is gray. She is wearing only a soiled slip. She smiles when he opens his eyes. The clock is on a shelf behind her head. The time is ten minutes past three. He knows it is P.M. and not A.M. because there is sunshine outside the window to the left of the shelf.

“He’s out burying the dog,” the woman says. She is still smiling. There is a gold tooth in the lower left-hand corner of her mouth. She has long thin arms like the man’s and her knuckles are raw and red. The shotgun is leaning against the seat of the chair, the barrel not six inches from her right hand. “Shouldn’ta killed that dog,” she says. “He loved that dog like his own son. Why’d you kill the dog?”

“He attacked me,” Colley says.

“You had no right in them woods,” the woman says.

Colley’s arm aches. The bleeding has stopped, but he is worried about gangrene or blood poisoning or whatever — things he has only heard about and has no real knowledge of, except that he knows they can result from gunshot wounds and probably from dog bites as well — Jesus, does he have to worry about rabies, too?

“What were you doin in the woods?” the woman says.

“Taking a walk.”

“That’s posted property. Didn’t you see the posted signs?”

“No. Listen, have you got something I can put on my arm here? I’m afraid it might get infected.”

The woman shakes her head. “Shouldn’ta killed that dog,” she says, ignoring his request. “You’re gonna be in for it, he gets back.”

He wonders if he should make a play for the shotgun now, before the man gets back. He does not think the man will kill him, because if he was going to do that, he’d have done it in the woods. But he can feel the throbbing bruise on the side of his face where the stock connected with his cheekbone, and he does not want to suffer a beating when the man returns. It has been his experience that bad situations only get worse. If you do not make your move when something is just starting, then everything gets out of hand later on and it is impossible to make a move that will change the picture. The woman is sitting there smiling, she seems frail enough, he decides he will make his move now, try for the gun, blow her brains out if she gives him any trouble. The woman anticipates him. She has seen something in his eyes, she has looked into his head and seen the wheels turning. She lifts the shotgun and points it at him and says only, “Don’t.”

“Relax,” he says.

“Oh, I’m relaxed,” she says, and smiles. “It’s you better relax, mister.”

He looks at her face. She looks like a hillbilly, what are hillbillies doing here in Jersey, he thought this was a civilized state? Her hair looks like rats are nesting in it, there is something crusted on her right check, pus or whatever, her lips are thin and cracked, the eyes are blue and cold and hard over the thin long nose and the smiling mouth, gold tooth in the corner. Behind her the clock ticks away minutes, throws minutes into the room onto the dirty floor; there are minutes twisting and turning on the floor.

“What do you want with me?” he says.

“Me? I don’t want nothin with you.”

“Then put up the piece and let me go.”

“Sam told me to keep you here.”

“I’ve got money,” Colley says. “I’ve got more than three hundred dollars,” he says, and reaches into his pocket and discovers the money is gone. “Where’s my money?” he asks the woman.

“Sam took it. That was a valuable dog,” she says.

“That was a killer dog,” Colley says.

“Even so,” the woman says, and shrugs and smiles. “He was a valuable dog.”

“Okay if I get up?”

“No, you better stay right where you are.”

“I’m cramped, I want to get up.”

“That’s too bad,” she says. “Stay put.”

“Fuck you, lady,” he says, and is about to stand up when the smile drops from her mouth, the gold tooth winks out. He thinks for a moment she will squeeze the trigger and end it all right then and there. He is immediately sorry for what he said, but he is also too late. She comes up out of the chair, and before he can turn away, before he even realizes what her intention might be, she kicks out at his wounded arm. She is wearing worn and faded, laceless white sneakers, and her kick does not hurt as much as it might if she were wearing Army boots, but it sends immediate pain shooting into his skull nonetheless. He tries to roll away from her, but she lifts her foot and stamps on his arm, and then stamps on it again as if she is trying to squash a persistent bug, until finally he manages to turn the arm away from her so she cannot reach it. Her legs are unshaven, her slip is soiled, there is pus on her face, she lives in a filthy shack in the woods — but she objects to his language. She is a censor, this fuckin hag, and she has stamped her opinion onto his arm, causing it to bleed again, making her point much more emphatically than if she had, for example, merely washed out his mouth with soap. Satisfied, she sits again. Against the wall, Colley whimpers in pain.

The door opens.

He cannot see the door from where he is lying in the corner, but he hears it opening, and then he feels the floorboards moving with the weight of the man who comes into the room.

“Over there,” a voice says, and he recognizes it as the voice of the man who hit him with the shotgun, and he realizes there are two men, or maybe more, coming into the room — their combined weight is what causes the floorboards to tremble beneath him.

“He’s got a dirty mouth,” the woman says.

“He get funny with you, Myra?”

“No, but he’s got an awful dirty mouth,” she says, and laughs.

Colley keeps his hurt arm pressed to the wall, fearful she will try to step on it again. He wonders what he is doing in this shack with these hillbillies. Before the hound came leaping out of the woods Colley’d been counting his money, which was a civilized enterprise, and before that he was running and laughing. Now there are three hillbillies standing around him — the woman Myra with her hairy legs and her soiled slip, and the man Sam in his dirt-encrusted bib overalls, and another man wearing glasses and a pair of khaki pants and a sports shirt patterned with big red flowers. Fat man. Fat legs bunched in khaki pants, fat arms hanging from the short sleeves of the shirt, fat face. Cigar in his mouth. He takes the cigar out now and looks down at Colley.

“What’s your name?” he says.

“What’s yours?” Colley answers, and sits up.

“Will Hollip,” the man answers, surprising Colley.

“I’m Jack Wyatt,” Colley says, giving them Jocko’s name; what the hell, Jocko is dead.

“Mr. Wyatt,” Will says, “you shot Sam’s dog here for no good reason...”

“The dog attacked me,” Colley says.

“You were on posted land,” Will says.

“That don’t give anybody the right to turn a killer dog loose on me.”

“That’s the gentlest dog ever did live,” Sam says.

“He sure is,” Colley said. “You see what he did to my arm?” he says, and stands up and shoves the arm at Will. “How you like that, Mr. Hollip? Does that look like I killed him for no good reason?”

“Sam says—”

“Sam wasn’t there, Sam didn’t get there till it was all over. And while we’re on Sam, look what he did to my face here.”

“You do that, Sam?” Will says.

“He killed my dog,” Sam says.

“And also Sam took three hundred and twenty-eight dollars from my pocket...”

“That’s a lie, Will.”

“And two pistols for which I have licenses. Carry licenses. They’re restricted to hunting, but they’re carry licenses, anyway.” He is lying, but he doesn’t think Will Hollip will realize it. He doesn’t know who Will Hollip is, but he is pleading to him now as he would to a higher authority, as though he’s been busted for the offense of killing a vicious dog, and has been brought to trial for it, and is now brilliantly pleading his own case to a benign fat judge who only needs a camera around his neck to be a tourist in Hawaii.

“You take two guns from this man?” Will asks.

“I did, Will. They’ll help pay for the dog.”

“If that mutt cost more than five dollars...” Colley says.

“Just watch it, mister,” Sam says.

“Well, Mr. Wyatt,” Will says, “I can understand how maybe the dog scared you, he’s a big dog. But—”

“Scared me? He came flying out of the woods...”

“But I got to agree with my brother here that what you did was illegal. Sam, we better take him over to the trooper station.”

Colley looks at fat little pot-bellied Will Hollip in his tight-fitting khakis and his flowered shirt, and he sees the resemblance now, the same blue eyes, the same shaggy brows — Will is simply a short, stout version of his big brother Sam. The three of them are watching him now, maybe waiting for him to make the move he should have made before it got too late, the way it is beginning to look too late now. Sam Hollip has taken the shotgun from Myra, who is either his wife or his sister, Colley can’t tell which. There seems to be no family resemblance except for maybe the hairy legs. He has hung the shotgun casually over his arm, but his finger is inside the trigger guard and Colley suspects he will not hesitate to shoot him if he makes a break for it. Or, if Sam doesn’t care to waste ammunition, he might simply hit Colley with the stock of the gun again, this time maybe breaking the cheekbone, whereas last time he merely bruised it. Colley does not want to get shot, nor does he want his cheek broken or even bruised. He only wants to get out of here.

If these dopes take him to the troopers with a complaint that he killed their hound, it’ll take the troopers ten seconds flat to realize that Colley is the man who held up the diner a mile and a half down the road, and then it’ll take them another ten seconds to find the teletype the New York fuzz undoubtedly sent out, and here we have Nicholas Donato, folks, bona-fide cop killer — is there maybe a reward? old Sam Hollip will ask. Colley cannot allow them to take him in. He cannot allow these country hicks to be the cause of his going back to jail forever. Because this time it will be forever. He has killed a cop, and for that you get either forever in jail or else you get the death penalty. That is one of the crimes you can still be executed for in the glorious, glamorous State of New York — cop-killing. Yes, the sentence for murdering a “peace officer,” as he is described in the criminal law, can be death, provided “there are no substantial mitigating circumstances which render the sentence of death unwarranted.” Kill a cop, and you are in trouble. Colley was in trouble even before he met these dopes. Now he is in even more trouble because these dimwits are going to lead him at gunpoint into the arms of the law and there goes the ball game.

He decides to make his move. His right arm is dangling uselessly, and dripping blood onto the wooden floor of the shack. As soon as he gets out of here, he will have to do something about the arm. But meanwhile, he has to get out of here. He has already tangled with old Sam Hollip, blue-eyed Death himself, and with the wiry, hairy woman who is either his sister or his wife — Colley would not be at all surprised if she’s his sister, and he’s humping her nightly here in the middle of the woods; ladies who can’t stand the word “fuck” are sometimes ladies who are not too terribly shocked by incest. Either way, husband and wife or brother and sister, they are tough customers and he is not eager to come up against either one of them ever again. Which leaves fat Will Hollip, brother to Sam, perhaps brother or at least brother-in-law to Myra, fat Will Hollip of the tight khakis and flowered shirt. How do I get to you, Will? How do I use you to get out of this dumb situation that can cost me my life?

He does not know.

The shotgun is looking him in the eye, but he has got to make his move because the next thing that will happen is he’ll be taken out to a car or a truck and driven to the state-trooper station. Or else he’ll be marched through the woods to the highway and then to the trooper station, but either way he is going to be in the hands of the cops, and this time it will be forever. There is no way he can possibly explain to a judge and jury that he was returning fire in self-defense in that liquor store. They will say that’s very nice to hear, Mr. Donato, but you shouldn’t have been inside that liquor store committing a felony in the first place, next case.

He decides to faint. All he wants to do is get his hands on that shotgun. He’s got only one good arm, and that’s enough to hold a shotgun and fire it, provided it’s been cocked — he suddenly wonders if the shotgun has been cocked. He is not as familiar with shotguns or rifles as he is with handguns, but this one looks like a slide-action repeater, and he wonders if the slide has been pulled back, cocking the gun. With only one good arm he will not be able to fiddle around with the slide and then get the gun in position again after he has it in his possession. He hopes it is cocked. He is about to give an Academy Award-winning performance, and the Oscar is the shotgun and he doesn’t want it to turn out to be brass instead of gold.

“Look, Mr. Hollip,” he says to Will, “that dog really did try to...” and he stops talking and puts his hand to his forehead, and then sways slightly, and then says “Uh, uh, uh,” like that, and leans in against Will and collapses against him. Will doesn’t know whether to grab him or what, he doesn’t want to get blood on his nice Hawaiian shirt. He keeps backing away and flapping his hands until it’s obvious he either has to catch Colley or let him fall flat on his face to the floor. He decides that’s what he wants to do, let Colley fall flat on his face, so he opens his arms wide and takes a very quick step backward, and Colley tumbles forward as realistically as he can without getting splinters in his face. Sam still has the shotgun. Twenty-gauge. Put a nice hole in a man if it’s fired up close.

“He’s out like a light,” Sam says.

“What you want to do with him?” Will asks.

“Give me a hand, we’ll drag him over in the corner again.”

Colley listens. He is listening for the sound of the shotgun being placed against the wall, the wooden stock hitting the wooden floor, or else being put on the table, the sound of metal scraping against wood or enamel. He is listening but he does not hear anything he hopes to hear. He wonders if he has made the wrong move, and then he begins to think Sam has simply handed the shotgun to his sister or his wife or whoever she is, the way he did earlier when he went out to bury the dog and fetch old brother Will. They are dragging Colley into the corner of the room. They are hurting him the way they are holding him, but he cannot scream or even wince, he is supposed to be unconscious. He has pulled this big fainting routine because he wants to get his hands — his hand actually, his one good hand, his left hand — on that shotgun, and now he doesn’t know where it is or who has it and he hears Sam telling Will they’ll need some rope, they’ll have to tie this sumbitch up.

It is getting worse, it is only getting worse. He did not make his move when he was supposed to make it, whenever that might have been, and now it is about to get worse, they are going to tie him up and leave him to bleed to death in the corner. Their voices retreat just a little way from him, they are going to look for rope to tie up the city slicker. He opens his eyes. He can see Myra’s hairy legs across the room level with his line of vision, laceless white sneakers, and he can see just a little past them to where Sam is standing, can see the blue overall bottoms rolled up over the high tops of his brown workshoes, but he cannot see Will Hollip nor can he see the shotgun.

“Let me get a stool for you,” Myra says, and suddenly the stock of the shotgun appears magically beside one sneakered foot. She is resting the shotgun on the floor, leaning it against something, a cupboard or a table or a chair, he doesn’t care what — it is there on the floor some fifteen feet from where he is lying in the corner. Myra leaves his frame of vision. He sees only Sam’s big shoes pointed in his direction now. Sam is waiting for Myra to get a stool. Rope has to be on a shelf someplace Sam can’t reach, loving wife or sister is making it easy for him. Sneakered feet again coming back into the frame, Myra puts down the stool. Sam climbs up on the stool, Colley sees only the backs of his high-topped shoes now. That means Sam’s back is to him, Will is Christ only knows where, and the shotgun is still leaning against something, its stock on the floor.

Colley makes his move all at once. No slow and steady crawling across the floor, no sneaky tactics, he gets to his feet in a crouch, like a track star about to break from the starting line, and he’s off in the same instant, sprinting across the wooden floor toward the shotgun. The gun is leaning against a square table, he can see the table now, and he can see the gun, and he only hopes the thing has been cocked, because otherwise he is dead. Myra has turned from watching Sam, who is fishing in a cabinet high up on the wall. She sees Colley crossing the room, and she knows just what he’s heading for, and she grabs the shotgun by the barrel just below the sight, and is bringing it up with her left hand, her right hand reaching for the stock when Colley gets to her. He doesn’t bother making a grab for the gun. Instead he punches her in the stomach, as hard as he can with his left hand, and she lets out a grunt and drops the gun, and staggers back against the counter. Sam has turned at the sound of the running and the scuffling, and he’s about to step down off the stool when he sees that Colley has picked up the shotgun and is holding it in just one hand, forward of the stock, his left index finger inside the trigger guard and on the trigger.

“Hold it,” Colley says.

Fat Will is at the sink on Colley’s left. He has been watching all this with some interest and much trepidation. He has probably never liked his brother’s vicious dog, nor his brother’s hairy wife or sister as the case may be, and he likes even less the notion of having a big shotgun hole put in him by a man who is bleeding and probably desperate. He just stays there at the sink, watching. His eyes tell Colley he hardly knows these two people, even though he is certainly related by blood to one of them and probably to both. On the stool, Sam says, “Easy now, boy.”

“Easy, shit,” Colley says.

“Easy now.”

“Get over here, Will!” Colley says.

“I didn’t do nothin,” Will says.

Sam has a coil of clothesline in his hands. He stands on the stool like a man who’s supposed to be making a speech in Union Square, probably a speech about how inhuman it is to hang people. There he is with the rope, ready to demonstrate his propostion, but all he’s got by way of a crowd is a skinny hairy lady, a fat man in a flowered sports shirt, both relatives, and a stranger who has already killed his dog and who is looking at him now as if he’s ready to kill him, too. Colley would like to kill the son of a bitch. It is Sam Hollip who allowed a vicious animal to roam free in the woods, it is Sam Hollip who smacked him in the face with a shotgun stock. Colley would like to kill him and Myra both; he has not forgotten that Myra stamped up and down on his arm a few times, nice lady.

“Give me that rope,” he says to Sam. “Get down off that stool. Will, you come here.”

“I didn’t do nothin,” Will says again.

“Get over here, Myra. With your brother here.”

“He’s my husband,” Myra says.

“Congratulations,” Colley says, and hands the clothesline to Will. “Will, I don’t have to tell you I want them tied so they can’t get loose,” he says.

“That’s right,” Will says, and nods.

“You understand me, don’t you, Will? If they can free their hands...”

“No, no,” Will says, “I’ll tie them real tight.”

“Good, you do that,” Colley says. “I want them back to back.”

“Myra, would you step over here, please?” Will says. He sounds very tired.

Colley would prefer doing the tying-up himself, but the fingers on his right hand feel numb, and his arm is bleeding again from Myra’s fancy footwork. He thinks maybe the numbness is psychological, but the blood certainly isn’t. He does not even want to look at the arm. He will have to do something about the arm, but first things first. He watches as Will ties Sam’s hands and then Myra’s hands, and then wraps brother and sister-in-law with clothesline as though he is wrapping a pair of back-to-back mummies for burial. “Good and tight,” Colley says.

He remembers the times he’s been busted, that first time he shot Luis Josafat Albareda in the throat, and then the time he was running away after the tailor-shop holdup and the cops surprised him. Both times they clamped the cuffs on his wrists like they wanted to go clear through to the bone. The way a pair of handcuffs is made, there’s a sawtooth edge that slides into the other side of the cuff. You squeeze the cuff onto a person’s wrist, the sawtooth edge is engaged and can’t be reversed unless you unlock the cuff. Makes it quick and easy for a cop to slam the cuffs on a man, zing, zing. They throw a cuff on one wrist, they whip your arms behind your back, they squeeze the cuff on the other wrist, you think your arms are going to break behind your back there, and you think your circulation is going to stop, you are going to die of your blood stopping there at your wrists.

They throw you in the squad car like you were a plastic bag of garbage.

The minute those cuffs are on your wrists, you stop being a human being. To a cop, you are the perpetrator. Perpetrator is a word out of police manuals. It is not a human being. You are the perpetrator all the while you are in a police station, and after they book you and take you downtown to the Criminal Courts Building to be arraigned, you become the accused and/or the defendant, and once you are convicted and sentenced, you become the prisoner. When you add all those things together you are nothing but a plastic bag of garbage.

“Tighter,” he says.

Outside the shack, there are rows and rows of corn and what looks like cabbage. He has left Myra and her husband Sam trussed on the floor back to back, and he has locked Will in the storage shed behind the shack. He is wearing the only clean clothes he could find in the whole filthy place, a pair of blue trousers and a white shirt and a plaid sports jacket. Under the sleeve of the sports jacket, he has wrapped a pillowcase around his arm. He thinks the blood has stopped, but he is not sure.

From Sam’s bib overalls he has taken the three hundred and twenty-eight dollars Sam stole from him earlier, and he has also taken the Smith & Wesson revolver. There are six bullets in that revolver, and he can fire it very nicely, thanks, with just his left hand. He would have taken whatever other money Sam had, but Sam didn’t have a nickel of his own. His brother Will had seventeen dollars and forty cents, and Colley relieved him of the bills but left the forty cents as a tip for his assistance in tying up Mr. and Mrs. Sam Hollip, newlyweds in Colley’s mind, since he’s only learned of their marriage quite recently.

The pickup truck is parked near what looks like a pigpen, but there aren’t any pigs in it. Sam has promised him the keys are in the ignition. He has told Sam that if the keys aren’t in the ignition, if he has to come all the way back here again and go through Sam’s pockets again for the keys, why, he will just leave Sam on the floor with a broken head. But the keys are here, and Colley starts the truck and feels a sharp pain in his arm, and wonders if he’s going to be able to drive the thing. He wants to find a phone booth. He has to get some help for his arm. There was no telephone in the shack, and no directory, and he wants to find one now so he can call a doctor and get some help. He doesn’t know what town he’s in, except that it’s somewhere near the Pennsylvania border, and he doesn’t know if it’s big enough to have a hospital, but he doesn’t want to go to a hospital anyway. That’s where he should go, to a hospital emergency room, he knows that. But he suspects a hospital would have to report an animal bite, don’t they have to call the Board of Health or something? For rabies? He doesn’t know, but he can’t take the chance. All he wants is a regular doctor, general practitioner. He’ll go in, tell the doctor he got bit by a dog, tell him the dog’s dead. Doctor wants to report it, he’ll do it tomorrow, this is Sunday, no rush. Be different at a hospital, everybody crisp and efficient in white.

Colley puts in the clutch and manipulates the gear shift till he feels certain he knows where reverse and the various drive positions are. He backs around the pigpen toward the side of the shack. The place is silent. Sun is shining on the cornstalks, the sky behind them is blue and cloudless. He brakes the truck, shifts into first, and drives down the dirt road to the highway. At the highway, he turns right, heading north, driving past the diner he held up not four hours ago. There are no police cars outside; the hubbub probably died down a long while ago. He wonders if they’ve taken Jeanine into custody.

If they’ve got her in custody, they’ll be asking her what Colley meant in the diner when he said “That’s my wife.” She’ll tell them that’s all bullshit, she never saw the man in her life, she was sitting out there deciding whether to go in for a hamburger. But they’ll search the car, which is their right because a crime was committed and they have good reason to believe she was an accomplice, since the holdup man did after all say she was his wife. They’ll search the car without a warrant, they won’t need a warrant, and they’ll find two boxes of cartridges in the glove compartment — a box of 9mm Parabellums and a box of .32 Longs. And they’ll already know from Ballistics that the bullet that hit the short-order cook in the shoulder was a 9mm Parabellum, so already there’s a connection between the woman who was sitting in the Pinto outside and the man who was in there shooting up the joint.

But more important than that, they will also find in the glove compartment an automobile registration for the Pinto, and it will be made out to one Jack William Wyatt. And if there were any good prints on the gun Jocko dropped in the liquor store last night, and if the New York fuzz got a make on him from the F.B.I. files, why then, a teletype went out describing Jack William Wyatt, alias Jocko Wyatt, alias Jockstrap Wyatt, as he was known in Texas prisons. And if the New Jersey cops are on the ball, then they will know at once that they’ve got hold of the wife of a man who held up a liquor store and was an accomplice in the crime of murder. It does not take Sherlock Holmes to look at a driver’s license. Jeanine Wyatt, it says on her license, they will have looked at her license long before they searched the car. If they can’t make a connection from that alone, then they are in the wrong business, they should give up law enforcement and begin selling storms and screens.

He figures she’s in trouble.

He does not give a damn. He hopes in fact that they will find Jocko’s body and nail her for the murder and lock her up and throw away the key. He does not want to run into her ever again. He can still remember her laugh, and it makes him shiver now. Up ahead, he sees a phone booth on the side of the road.

He has to get help for his arm.

The doctor who opens the door looks a lot younger than he sounded on the telephone. His name is Emory Hughes. He has coal-black hair and brown eyes. He is perhaps forty, forty-five years old and he looks like a tennis player or a skier. Colley wouldn’t know a tennis player or a skier if he woke up in bed with one at Wimbledon or St. Moritz, but he’s seen actors pretending to be tennis players or skiers on television, and this doctor, this Emory Hughes, looks like one of those actors. Usually the actors drink beer afterwards. The beers are interchangeable. Colley can never remember which beer the actors are drinking after they get off the squash court or the sailboat, or after they finish climbing the mountain or jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. He wonders if Dr. Emory Hughes drinks beer. He wonders if Dr. Emory Hughes is an actor pretending to be a doctor, the way he himself is an armed robber named Nicholas Donato pretending to be a tourist named Steve Casatelli. He has chosen the name Casatelli because he is sure that when he talks he sounds Italian. Carter Hewlitt from New Canaan, Connecticut, once told him that the minute he opens his mouth his heritage is immediately apparent. Those were her exact words. That was before she fucked up on the getaway that time. He has chosen the name Steve only because he likes that name, always wished his mother had named him Steven instead of Nicholas. Or Stephen with a p-h, that would have been just as good.

“Mr. Castelli,” the doctor says, getting the name wrong. You give somebody a name ends in a, i or o, they immediately pronounce it wrong.

“Casatelli,” Colley says, correcting him, and wondering suddenly if the mispronunciation was a trap. Does the good doctor suspect that this man here with the gnawed arm is not indeed a tourist traveling through the Garden State of New Jersey, but is instead an armed robber who knocked off a diner five miles south of here at twelve noon?

“Excuse me,” the doctor says, and smiles. “Let’s take a look at that arm, shall we? This way, please.”

He follows the doctor through the waiting room and into an examination room. The office is part of a white clapboard house with a white picket fence. Somewhere in the house Colley can hear a baseball game on television. In the back yard there’s the sound of children lauging. The doctor watches him as he takes off the plaid jacket. The jacket is winter-weight and the sleeves are a little too long for Colley. He wonders if the doctor is noticing this. Sunlight slants through the curtained window. In a glass-fronted cabinet on the wall opposite, scalpels gleam.

“Would you sit up here, please?” the doctor says, and Colley gets onto the examination table. There is not much blood on the pillowcase he wrapped around his arm. The doctor removes it gingerly, and says “Mmm” when he sees the wound. There is blood caked all over the wound, it looks worse now than it did just after the dog quit gnawing on it. The doctor goes to a cabinet and takes a squeeze-bottle from it, and then wets a piece of gauze and gently soaps out the wound. As he works, it begins to look a little better. There is some fresh blood, but just a little, and he wipes this away and studies the tom flesh and the teeth marks on the arm where the skin has not been ripped.

“Where’d this happen?” the doctor asks.

“Down the road,” Colley says.

“Big dog?”

“Police dog,” Colley says, and then says, “German shepherd, a German shepherd.”

“Mmm,” the doctor says. “Where’s the dog now?”

“Dead,” Colley says. “I killed him.”

“Mmm,” the doctor says.

“Am I going to need stitches?”

“Not with this kind of injury,” the doctor says. “Animal bites, human bites, we leave the wound open. No sutures,” he says, and smiles suddenly, looking more like a tennis player than ever. “Don’t worry, Mr. Casatelli,” he says, getting the name right this time and patting Colley’s shoulder reassuringly.

He opens a drawer in the cabinet and searches among a clutter of drug samples, and comes up with a small tube. “This is just an antibiotic,” he says, and unscrews the black cap and squeezes the ointment onto a gauze bandage. He puts the bandage over the wound, and then takes out a roll of gauze and begins wrapping the arm.

Colley is beginning to feel better. He likes the way this doctor handles himself, and he also feels very comfortable here in the examination room, with sunlight slanting through the window and children laughing in the back yard and a baseball game going on television. It is like he is in a relative’s house. It is like he is a kid again, and he cut his finger visiting one of his relatives, and an uncle or somebody is taking care of it.

But as the doctor bandages the arm, he begins telling Colley about rabies, scaring him half to death. He tells Colley he does not wish to alarm him, and then he starts giving him the symptoms, starting with a pain in the scarred arm, the arm will have healed over by then. This will be about forty days from now, it takes about forty days for the virus to incubate, it is different with a face bite or a leg bite. Colley doesn’t want to hear it. He is beginning to sweat as the doctor tells him that if he has rabies, and he certainly doesn’t want to alarm Colley, why, then the symptoms will start with a pain in the scarred arm, and he’ll also have a headache, and he’ll feel generally lousy, and he won’t have any appetite, and there’ll be vomiting, and restlessness, and apprehension, and he’ll have difficulty swallowing. Later on there’ll be mucus in his mouth and he’ll be breathing hard and talking fast, and eventually he’ll go into convulsions at the slightest stimulus and will suffer delirium and maniacal attacks, until finally, on the third or fourth day of the acute phase, he’ll go into paralysis, coma, and finally death.

The doctor is finished bandaging the arm now. He goes to another drawer, the place is full of drawers, and he takes out a hypodermic and a vial. He pierces the top of the vial with the needle, fills the syringe, and says very briefly, “Tetanus toxoid.” He rubs a little cotton ball saturated with alcohol onto the biceps of Colley’s arm, and then gives him the shot so Colley can’t even feel it. Colley nods.

“Okay?” the doctor says.

“Yes, fine.”

“Is that cheek bothering you?”

“No, it’s... I bruised it when the dog attacked me.”

“I wish I knew if that dog were rabid,” the doctor says, getting back to the goddamn gruesome subject of rabies.

“He wasn’t foaming at the mouth or anything,” Colley says.

“Where’d you leave him?”

He can’t tell the doctor he left the dog in the woods because then the doctor will want to know what he was doing in the woods and which woods and so on. “By the side of the road,” he says. “I got out of the truck to stretch a bit and the dog attacked me.”

“Side of the road where?” the doctor says.

“Few miles from here.”

“Because if he’s licensed, he’ll have had his rabies shot, you see.”

“Yeah,” Colley says.

“If I were you, I’d call the police...”

“Well, I’m just passing through...”

“Because even if the dog isn’t licensed, once they find him they can cut off the head and test the brain.”

“Well, I don’t think he had rabies,” Colley says. “He wasn’t foaming.”

“It’s up to you,” the doctor says. “But I’d call the police if I were you. It’d be worth the peace of mind. Rabies is not a pleasant disease.”

“Well, thank you, maybe I will,” Colley says.

“Or I can phone for you, if you like.”

“That’d be fine,” Colley says. “I’d appreciate that.”

“A few miles up the road, you said? Was that north or south?”

“South,” Colley says.

“If the dog should prove to be rabid, how can I reach you?”

“I’m at 1217 Kruger Avenue,” Colley says. “In the Bronx.”

“1217 Kruger,” the doctor says, writing.

“Yes,” Colley says. He knows there is a Kruger Avenue in the Bronx, but he has never been there. He suddenly realizes that he has given the doctor the name of the man who made his life miserable in prison. Kruger. The Kraut.

“How much is that, Doctor?” Colley asks.

“Twenty-five dollars,” the doctor says.

Colley pays him, and shakes hands with him, and leaves the office.

Behind him, he can hear the doctor’s children playing in the back yard.

He is sure he has rabies.

As he drives the pickup north, he begins to imagine he has all the symptoms the doctor talked about. He begins to believe that his hyped-up, slowed-down condition is a result of the dog biting him. He cannot remember feeling this way before the dog rushed out of the woods and bit him, this feeling of running in place though he is running forward as fast as he can, this sense of impending doom. Apprehension is what the doctor called it. Restlessness and apprehension. He does not remember that this all began the moment Jeanine pulled the red Pinto into the parking lot in front of the diner. The holdup seems centuries ago. He is centuries old and he has rabies and he will go into convulsions at the slightest stimulus and suffer delirium and maniacal attacks. If there is any way he does not want to die, it is from rabies. If he has any choice in the matter, he will choose even death by drowning over rabies. Rabies has got to be the dumbest way in the world to die.

He is suddenly ravenously hungry. The hunger attacks him like another pain, he thinks at first it may be a symptom the doctor forgot to mention. Except for the lecture on rabies, he likes the way that doctor handled himself. He admires professionalism, and the doctor was a real pro. Things were different, these were different times, they’d probably go out and play a few games of tennis together, have a beer afterwards. Jesus, he is starving hungry, he wants a hamburger and a cold beer. He begins looking for a place to eat, but all he can find is a drugstore in a roadside shopping center, with signs in the window advertising specials like eggs with bacon, toast and coffee for 99¢. This is Sunday, he hopes the lunch counter is open. The way he feels, he is going to eat the gear shift if he doesn’t get some real food soon.

The day has turned hot and humid; he takes off the wool plaid jacket and throws it onto the seat of the truck. He isn’t worried about his bandaged arm being seen; there is no law against getting bit by a dog. He has put the Smith & Wesson in the glove compartment and he leaves it there now, and hitches up his belt when he gets out of the truck, and then walks casually toward the drugstore. He would not walk this casually if he had not killed a man last night. He is exaggerating everything. He does not know why. He is sure it’s because he has rabies.

The drugstore is one of those places that sell everything from desk lamps to inflatable whales for swimming pools. He pities a poor guy coming in here to have a prescription filled cause he’d never find where they keep the drugs. Behind the lunch counter there’s a waitress wearing black slacks and a pale-blue blouse. Colley thinks of Jill in the diner, the way she came on with that truck driver, dumb fuck with a button on his hat. She’ll probably be talking about the holdup for the rest of her life. Tell her children and her grandchildren about it. At the far end of the counter there’s an old guy wearing a fedora on the back of his head. He is sucking his teeth and mumbling to himself. The waitress comes over to Colley.

“Hi,” she says. She is a girl in her twenties, black hair pulled back in a ponytail, brown eyes, full figure.

Colley figures she’s Italian; with that coloring it’s eight-to-five she isn’t Irish. He feels a little bit safer thinking she’s Italian. He’s about to get something to eat, and he’s alone here in the drugstore with just an Italian waitress, an old guy sucking his teeth, and a cashier sitting there at the checkout counter. The drugstore has a checkout counter like a supermarket, it’s really a supermarket in disguise. The drugstore goes into a phone booth, takes off all its clothes, and out flies a supermarket.

“Hi,” Colley says. “I’d like a hamburger and a cold beer.”

“You can get the hamburger, but all we’ve got is soft drinks.”

“Okay, a Coke then. Put everything you got on the burger, okay?”

“Well, what’d you want?” the waitress says.

“Relish and a slice of tomato and some onions and pickles, everything you got.”

“Are you pregnant or something?” the girl asks, and smiles.

“No, I got rabies,” Colley says, and returns the smile.

At the end of the counter the old man says, “Everybody’s got something wrong with them. There’s nobody in the world has nothing wrong with them.”

The girl taps her temple, indicating the old man is nuts. Colley nods. She goes over to where the hamburger patties are, and puts one on the griddle and then goes to draw his Coke. Colley is thinking he should hide the crew cut. The cops are sure to have questioned Jeanine, and she is sure to have told them who he is and how she cut his hair early this morning. He doesn’t expect there’s been any big television flash about the diner holdup, that’ll wait till the six o’clock news tonight, if it gets on the air at all. There’s maybe been radio news about it, but he’s not worried about that because you can’t show what a man looks like on a radio broadcast. What he’s afraid of is that Jeanine has told the Jersey cops about him and they have contacted the New York cops, who have sent pictures to the toll collectors at the bridges and tunnels. So he takes a sip of Coke, and while his hamburger is cooking he gets up and wanders around the drugstore, looking for something he can put on his head. He finds a billed cap that looks like the kind of hat his brother Albert used to wear when they went fishing together. That was when they first moved to the Bronx. Albert used to take him out to City Island, and they used to go fishing. The cap is blue, it looks just like the hat Albert used to wear. He tries it on, and then takes it back to the counter with him.

“Where do I pay for this?” he asks the waitress.

“The food here, the hat at the checkout,” she says. “What happened to your arm?”

“A dog bit me,” he says.

“You really got rabies?”

“No, no.”

“Cause that’s catching, ain’t it? Rabies?”

At the far end of the counter the old man says, “There’s nobody in the world has nothing wrong with them.”

“It’s only catching if I bite you,” Colley says, and smiles.

“You’re not going to bite me, are you?” the girls says. She is looking at him sideways, like a sultry movie queen in an old television movie, sort of from under partially closed lids. She has one hand on her hip. Behind her the hamburger is sizzling on the griddle.

“No, I’m not going to bite you,” Colley says.

“How you want this hamburger?” she says.

“Medium rare.”

She goes to the griddle, shovels the hamburger off it and puts it on a bun. Then she puts two slices of tomato on it, and some pickles and relish and onions, and she throws a couple of green olives and a piece of celery on the plate and brings it over to him. The hamburger is delicious. He has never tasted anything so delicious in his life. The girl watches him as he eats. It is as if she has never before seen a hungry man eating. She watches each move he makes, she watches the hamburger coming up to his mouth, and his teeth closing over it, she watches him chewing and swallowing, she is making a documentary on what it is like to eat a hamburger.

“You’re not a bit hungry, are you?” she says.

“Nobody,” the old man at the end of the counter says. “Nobody in the world has nothing wrong. Miss?” he says.

“Yes, sir?” she says.

“I would like a check, please.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, and walks over to him.

Colley watches her behind in the tight black slacks. She knows he is looking at her. She exaggerates her walk. She is wearing low-heeled shoes, but she struts over to the old man as if she is wearing rhinestone slippers with three-inch spikes. As she makes out the old man’s ticket, she glances at Colley and smiles. He nods. He is beginning to think he may not go back to New York after all. Where can he go in New York? He goes to his mother’s place, the fuzz’ll be there waiting. He can’t go to Teddy’s house, Teddy’ll slam the door in his face. And the cops have a dossier on all the guys used to be in the Orioles, they’ll be watching Benny’s pad, all the guys, what’s the sense of going back there? Back there is where he killed the cop. At least here in Jersey the cop beef ain’t theirs. All they’re worried about is the diner holdup. He thinks maybe he will explore this little Italian waitress a wee bit further.

He knows he is very good with girls, and he further knows he is very good-looking. But he is also smart enough to know there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t think he himself is good-looking. Man looks in the mirror, he says to himself, “Good morning, you handsome irresistible devil.” He’d catch guys in prison looking at themselves in the mirror, preening. Ugliest sons of bitches in the world, you ran into one of them in a dark alley you’d drop dead of a heart attack just looking at them. Preening. Good morning, you handsome irresistible devil. So he’s smart enough to know that maybe he’s mistaken about how good-looking he is or isn’t, but he knows he has a pretty fair batting average with girls, and he prides himself on the fact that he’s never had to pay for it in his life. That’s not to say he hasn’t fucked whores, because he has. But he’s never paid for it. Never. He is pretty confident that the girl here in the drugstore finds him attractive, and he is also confident that he can make her.

The old man gets off the stool and counts his change. He stares at the change in the palm of his hand and then counts it again. When he approaches the checkout counter, the cashier puts down her confession magazine and looks annoyed because she think’s she’s perhaps going to have to stop reading and do her job instead. But the old man has paid at the lunch counter, and he jerks his thumb back at the waitress, and the cashier nods and picks up the confession magazine, and he goes through the checkout and out of the drugstore.

The waitress is standing in front of Colley now. She has her hands on her hips. “Will there be anything else, sir?” she asks.

“Call me Steve,” he says, using the name he gave the doctor.

“Okay, Steve,” she says, and she makes it sound like they have already agreed to spend a month together in Brazil. “Will there be anything else?”

“Depends what you got in mind,” Colley says, and smiles.

“Right now, I got food in mind,” she says.

“But that’s only right now, huh?” he says. She is smiling, too. They are both smiling and looking into each other’s faces. “How about later, huh?”

“We’ll see about later,” she says.

“How about seeing about later now?” he says.

“You want a cup of coffee?”

“I want to talk about later.”

“Have a cup of coffee first,” she says.

“Okay, I’ll have a cup of coffee and also a piece of that Danish back there. Is that Danish?”

“Cheese Danish,” she says.

“Let me have a little piece of it,” he says.

He watches her as she draws the coffee, and lifts the cover off the Danish tray, and picks up a piece of pastry. He is still watching her when she brings the coffee and the Danish to the counter. She is wearing a smoky sultry look now; she smiles like a harem girl through a gauze mask.

“What’s your name?” he says.

“Marie.”

“Are you Italian, Marie?”

“French,” she says.

“French. Well, well. How old are you, Marie?”

“Old enough, don’t worry,” she says.

“What time do you get out of here, Marie?”

“Six.”

“That late, huh?” The coffee is very hot. He sips at it gingerly and then puts the cup back on the counter. “Six o’clock, huh?”

“Yes.” She is looking at him steadily.

“Maybe I’ll stop back here later,” he says. “What time is it now?” He looks at his wristwatch. “Almost four-thirty,” he says. “That gives me an hour and a half.”

“That’s right,” she says.

“So maybe I’ll stop back later.”

“If it’s maybe,” she says, “forget it.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” he says, but she has already walked away to the end of the counter. She comes around the counter, sits on a stool, picks up the comics from the Sunday News, and begins reading Dick Tracy.

Colley sips at his coffee. He is going to give her plenty of time. He puts the hat on his head and looks at himself in the mirror behind the counter. Not bad. He looks a little bit like Albert L. Donato, the noted Buick dealer. He sips some more coffee. He tilts the hat at a more rakish angle. He winks at himself in the mirror and then glances toward where Marie is still reading the funnies at the end of the counter. She is thoroughly absorbed in Dick Tracy. She is lip-reading her way through Dick Tracy there at the end of the counter.

“Marie?” he says.

She turns toward him as if a stranger has entered the drugstore and she cannot locate the sound of his voice. She has heard someone speaking, but she cannot imagine who it can possibly be, since she is alone in the place with only the cashier and Dick Tracy, and this voice from out of the blue has startled her. She locates Colley at last, sighs, gets up off the stool, comes around the counter, and walks to where he is sitting.

“Hi,” he says.

She says nothing. She stares at him. She is mortally offended.

“Can I have a check, please?” he says.

She begins writing. She does not look at him now. Her pencil scratches out the figures on her pad. He looks at her hand as she writes. The fingernails are bitten to the quick; he likes tense, nervous girls, they are very good in bed.

“You’re a pretty girl, Marie,” he says.

She does not look up.

“You want me to come back here at six o’clock?”

She puts the check on the counter face-down, and then she looks up into his face. He thinks she is going to tell him to go to hell. Instead, she says, “Do what you like.”

“I’d like to come back,” he says.

“Fine,” she says.

“Okay, I’ll be back at six.”

“Fine.”

“You live near here?”

“Yes.”

“You got a car?”

“I take a bus.”

“Cause all I’m driving is a pickup truck.”

“That’s okay.”

“Okay,” he says, and picks up the check. “Do I pay this here?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Okay,” he says, and takes out his wallet, and wonders if he’s supposed to tip her. He’s just made a date with her, is he supposed to tip her? He pays her the exact amount on the check, and she gives him a look, and he can’t tell whether she’s still sore because of what he said earlier, or whether she’s sore now because he stiffed her. “Well, I’ll see you later,” he says, and walks away from the counter. At the checkout, he takes off the blue cap and hands it to the cashier. She looks inside it for a price tag, and then rings up the sale. The plate-glass windows at the front of the store are behind her. Through them Colley can see the pickup truck. Alongside the truck is a white car marked NEW JERSEY STATE POLICE.

“That’s a dollar forty-seven,” the cashier says.

The police car is empty. Colley can see the trooper in the cab of the pickup truck, rummaging around. He can only assume that fat Will Hollip got out of the storage shed and called the state police to tell them a man had shot his brother’s valuable and gentle German shepherd and stole a pickup truck besides. Otherwise, why would a trooper be going through the truck now? He will find the Smith & Wesson in a minute. He will thumb open the glove compartment and find the gun. Colley turns immediately from the checkout counter and walks to where Marie is sitting reading the funnies again. She just cannot tear herself away from Dick Tracy, this girl. She has already read four panels of the strip. By Christmas she will have finished the whole page. He imagines being in bed with her. He imagines trying to talk to her afterwards. It will be like talking to a yak.

“Marie,” he says, “is there a back door to this place?”

“Why?” she says, and looks up from the comics into his face. Her eyes dart past him to the front door.

Colley turns at once. The door is opening. The trooper is coming inside. He has his gun in his hand. Colley does not know what kind of gun it is, but he knows that the troopers in some states use .357 Magnums, and he knows a bullet from a Magnum can tear off your head. The gun in the trooper’s hand is a big one, it could easily be a Magnum. Colley starts moving toward the back of the drugstore. He does not think the trooper has seen him yet. He figures the reason the trooper has his piece in his hand is because he’s had a report on a stolen pickup truck, and he’s found the truck and there’s a weapon in the glove compartment. Which is enough reason for him to proceed with caution. To him, proceeding with caution means having his own weapon in his hand as he enters the drugstore in front of which the pickup truck is parked.

Colley is moving down the center aisle, shelves on his left and right, shelves of perfume, Band-Aids, toothpaste, cologne, razor blades, shaving cream, deodorants, menstrual pads: he is moving between shelves of stationery and monster models, playing cards and boxes of candy; he is moving between shelves of magazines and paperback books. He spots the door at the back of the place, a glass door with a metal push bar across it about waist-high. He tries the door, and it is locked. He glances back over his shoulder. The trooper has moved from the checkout counter to the lunch counter. He is talking to Marie, and she is pointing toward the rear of the store.

The door is wired for a burglar alarm, metal strips creating a border design around the glass. He knows the alarm isn’t on, otherwise it would ring every time somebody came in the front door. Besides, an alarm going off would only bring cops, and he has a cop here already, looking toward the back of the store and nodding. In a minute he will come through the store yelling. And maybe shooting. Colley brings back his foot and kicks out flatfooted at the deadbolt lock. The door doesn’t budge. He kicks at it again. The cop is coming down the center aisle now. His gun is out in front of him. Colley thinks he has been here before. He has certainly been here before with a cop coming down the aisle at him holding a gun. This cop is not holding the gun in his left hand. This cop is not holding up a shield. This cop is just coming down the aisle very fast. There is also one other difference. Colley does not have a gun.

“Hey, you!” the cop yells.

There are garbage cans and rakes and rubber hoses in the back part of the store, sprinklers, trowels, bags of fertilizer — this is the gardening section of this drugstore that’s a supermarket. There are metal garbage cans and plastic garbage cans. He picks up one of the heavy metal cans and hurls it at the glass door, but it just bounces off the fuckin door, the door has got to be made of steel though it only looks like glass. He picks up a rake and swings it at the door, and the wooden handle of the rake breaks in half, and the door still hasn’t got a dent in it. The cop is yelling “You, hey you!” and there is nothing Colley can do now but run toward the front of the store again, either that or be taken. There are three aisles in the store, and the cop is running down the center aisle, the gun getting bigger and bigger as he comes closer and closer. Colley breaks for the aisle on the left, and the gun goes off like a cannon, putting a huge hole in the glass door behind him. Colley is sure it is a Magnum now, and he is afraid of it, he does not want to get shot with a Magnum.

He is running up an aisle that has glassware in it, Pyrex dishes and serving bowls and drinking glasses and brandy snifters, this is some drugstore. He knows that when the cop reaches the end of the center aisle, he will come around into this aisle, and he will drop to one knee and steady his firing arm and put a big hole in Colley’s back. He has already fired his warning shot, and he is shouting “Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!” as he comes running down the center aisle, Colley going in the opposite direction up the aisle on the left. There is a space above the shelves, an open space, the drugstore has a high vaulted ceiling and the shelves are really only dividers between the aisles. He climbs the divider on his right the way he climbed that fence in the Bronx, only now he is knocking glasses and dishes and cups and saucers to the floor; the entire glasswares department of this fine drugstore-super-market-department store is crashing into the aisle as he climbs the divider and rolls over the top of it as if it is a back-yard fence, and drops into the middle aisle. The blue hat drops from his head. He does not stop to pick it up.

He comes sprinting up the aisle, heading straight for the checkout counter. The cashier has stopped reading her confession magazine, there is a true story unfolding right here where she works, and she is watching Colley goggle-eyed as he runs toward her. For no good reason, she starts screaming. Behind him, the trooper has figured out that Colley isn’t in the aisle on the left any more, he has climbed over the divider and is in the center aisle again. But Colley has a good lead on him, and even when the trooper opens fire behind him, he feels confident he is going to make it through the checkout counter and out of the store. The cashier ducks, she is afraid she’s going to get shot by accident. Colley runs past her and veers sharply to his left, toward the front door. In a minute he is outside in the parking lot. He does not know whether to keep running, or take the pickup truck, or steal the trooper’s car. He wonders if the trooper has left his keys in the car. He doubts it.

He decides to run.

He has always been good at running.

He runs parallel to the front of the drugstore, and then cuts sharply around the edge of the building and into the woods behind it. If the trooper has seen him going into the woods, Colley will still be better off in here than running on the highway, in the open. He is wearing Sam Hollip’s blue pants and white short-sleeved shirt, this is the second time in twelve hours he’s had on clothes belonging to another man. He wishes the pants and the shirt were green, be better camouflage if the trooper opens fire again. But he does not hear any thrashing in the woods behind him; is it possible the trooper didn’t see him coming in here? He tries to remember the kind of lead he had on the trooper, was it long enough so that by the time the trooper came out the front door, Colley would already have been around the side of the building? But wouldn’t the trooper have seen him through the plate-glass windows, running toward the right? And wouldn’t he have guessed that Colley’d be heading for the woods instead of the highway?

The terrain slopes sharply upward, he is doing more climbing than he is running, but he still doesn’t hear anything behind him — is it possible? Is it possible that dumb trooper doesn’t know he’s in here? He begins to suspect a trap. Maybe the trooper knows a shortcut, maybe he’s circling around from another direction, he’ll spring out of the woods the way Sam Hollip’s monster dog did. But the only sound in the woods is the sound of Colley’s own breathing, and the crackle of twigs underfoot as he labors up the incline, and the hum of insects and the occasional voice of a bird. Nothing else. He is getting very good at hearing things in the woods, despite the fact that he is only a city boy. Maybe they will do an article on him once this is all over. Put his picture on the cover of a magazine. He does not have much hair on his chest, however.

He has reached the crest of the hill now. The ground is level here, the rock outcropping covered with soil and tufted with weeds. On the other side the ground rolls gently away into a grassy valley. There are wild flowers in the valley, blue and yellow and white and lavender. The sun is shining brightly, and there is a single cloud in the sky; it hangs motionless, a puff of white.

He starts slowly down the gentle slope.

He does not know how long he has been walking. He has forgotten to wind his watch, and it has stopped at four o’clock, and he does not know what time it is now. Ahead of him, beyond a fringe of trees, he hears voices and laughter.

He has come through the valley and into a woods on the other side of it. He has rested more than once in dappled clearings, and he has stopped to drink water from a trickle of a stream deep in the woods. He has crossed a pasture of waist-high grass, butterflies circling, grasshoppers leaping ahead of him, and now he comes through yet another glade, and cautiously approaches the voices and the laughter. He crouches. He peers through the leaves.

There are men and women in bathing suits on a lawn as emerald-bright as the valley had been. The pool beyond sparkles with late-afternoon sunshine. A black man in a white jacket and black trousers is standing behind a table covered with a white cloth. There are whiskey bottles and glasses on the table, a dish with lemon peels and lime wedges, another dish with olives. The black man is mixing a drink for a tall blond suntanned woman wearing a white string bikini. A fat man wearing red trunks and black-rimmed glasses is telling a joke. When he finishes the joke, the circle of men and women around him burst out laughing.

Colley would love a drink. He would love nothing better than to stroll out of the woods and up to the bar, ask the nigger for a gin and tonic. A gin and tonic would hit the spot now. The fat man is obviously the host. He leaves the group of people he’s just told the joke to, and wanders over to another group, probably to tell the same joke. If he was any kind of host, he’d ask Colley to come out of the woods and have a gin and tonic. There are great-looking women here, none of them spring chickens, but all of them tall and suntanned and wearing hardly any clothes.

There is the smell of money hanging over this place. The black man has set up his bar on a flagstone terrace covered with a striped awning, red and yellow. Behind the terrace, there are mullioned doors leading to a room in shadow beyond. The house is very big, ivy-covered stone rising to turrets and gabled windows, a slate roof, copper gutters, a huge chimney with three green hooded cones sticking out of it. The women are sleek and tan and swift as race horses, and the men ignore them the way only rich men would, talking instead about their investments in oil or soybeans, talking about their clubs in New York, talking about the great squash game they had yesterday, after which they came off the court and drank some beer advertised on television, talking about the business trips they will take to Europe in the fall, and the French girls they are going to fuck when they get to Paris.

Colley envies them and hates them.

He wants a gin and tonic.

He wants the tall sleek blonde in the white string bikini.

He circles around through the trees, toward the diving-board end of the pool, working his way toward the big stone house. It has occurred to him that all these fat rich bastards out here are in swimming trunks. They are out here talking among themselves, ignoring their sleek tanned women, and they are in swimming trunks — which means their clothes are somewhere in the house. Or maybe in a separate pool house. Colley can’t see a pool house. He knows what a pool house looks like because he has seen movies in which people come out of a cabana is what you call them, these pool houses, and then jump in the water or lie in the sun. He has never swum in a private pool. He would like to swim in this pool with the tall blonde in the white string bikini. The only pools he has ever swum in are the Boys’ Club pool on 110th Street when he was living in Harlem, and the Jefferson Pool on First Avenue, also when he was in Harlem. And then after they’d moved to the Bronx he swam at Tibbetts Brook in Yonkers, and also at Willsons Woods, and once his brother Al took him to Playland and they swam in the pool there. He would give his right arm to swim in this pool with the blonde in the white string bikini. Rabies and all, he would give it. He would give his left arm for a gin and tonic. He would swim armless to the side of the pool and ask the nigger to hold the drink to his lips. The blonde would giggle at his marvelous stunt, an armless man swimming the length of the pool. He would be the first unarmed robber in history.

The trees completely surround the house, he is grateful to the landscaper. The back of the house is all stone, windows slightly higher than his head on the main floor, windows on the second floor some fifteen feet above that; high ceilings. He is looking for a door he can go in through. He keeps circling the house through the trees, and he finds a place where there’s a small courtyard, and on one wall in the angle where the walls join, there’s a door painted a pale blue. Brass knocker on it. Dutch door, top half open. Inside he can see a black woman puttering around.

He doesn’t know if the lady of the house is in the kitchen giving orders to the hired help, but he figures he’ll take a chance. He wants to get in that house and find himself some different threads. The trooper back there must have seen he was wearing blue pants and a white shirt. Even if the trooper didn’t see it, Marie sure as hell did. Very anxious to help the police officer, old Marie was. There he is, Officer, heading for the door at the back of the store. Thank you, Marie. You cunt. He comes out of the woods and walks nonchalantly across the lawn toward the kitchen door. Inside the kitchen, the black woman is humming. This is plantation time down South. She is probably cooking corn on the cob in a great big pot on the stove and she is humming old slave tunes. He walks right in the kitchen. The black woman is alone in there.

“Hi,” he says.

“Afternoon,” the woman says, and looks at him.

“I’d like to take a swim,” he says, which is most certainly the truth.

“Yessir,” the woman says.

“Where do I change my clothes?” he asks. This is the truth, too, more or less. He sincerely wants to change his clothes, or rather Sam Hollip’s clothes, for somebody else’s clothes.

“Top of the stairs,” the woman says.

“Thank you,” Colley says, and smiles pleasantly, and walks out of the kitchen into a carpeted hallway.

Everybody’s outside, the house is still and empty, there are dust motes climbing shafts of sunlight in the living room. A woman laughs, her laughter hangs delicately on the air and then shatters like broken glass. He climbs the carpeted steps. He has never been inside a house like this in his life. He wonders if the owner of the house, the fat man in the red trunks and black-rimmed glasses, keeps a gun. He would certainly like a gun. Once he gets himself a change of clothes, which he is sure to do in the room at the top of the stairs, the only thing he will then need is a pistol. Guy has a house like this one, he’s got to have a gun in it someplace, protect the turf. The door at the top of the stairs is ajar, Colley can see into it, can see one angle of the bed, and on it clothes neatly laid out.

He goes into the room and closes the door.

There are only men’s clothes in here, the ladies have probably changed in another room. There are trousers and shirts and undershorts on the bed, and on the floor around the bed, lined up in pairs, there are shoes with socks tucked into them. Through the two open windows in the bedroom, he can hear people laughing and splashing and talking outside. He has a crazy idea for a minute — if there’s a bathing suit someplace around, maybe in one of the dresser drawers, he’ll put it on and go join the party. Stroll over to the bar, tell the nigger he’d like a gin and tonic. Then find the blonde in the white string bikini, tell her she looks very familiar, didn’t he once drink beer with her in a television commercial? It was right after they won the stickball game, remember? She will laugh her laugh, it will hang on the air and tinkle like glass.

Most of the guys outside looked fat to him, he wonders now if any of these clothes will fit him. He is beginning to think that he will never again in his lifetime wear his own clothes. When they put him in his coffin in excruciating detail, hands folded over a rosary on his chest, he will be wearing a silk sports shirt and gabardine trousers and stretch socks and patent-leather shoes belonging to some fat rich bastard in New Jersey. He searches on the bed for a pair of pants that seem to be about his size, and he finds a good-looking pair of white slacks, and a shirt made out of a synthetic fabric, polyester and cotton it says on the label, blue-and-green pattern on it, long-sleeved. The long sleeves are good because dear Marie back in the drugstore is sure to have told the trooper the man had a bandage on his arm and was kidding about rabies. He feels a little funny putting on another man’s undershorts, used undershorts at that, but he puts them on and then slips on the white pants, Jesus, they fit like a glove. He puts on the shirt then and rolls up the cuffs just two turns. He leaves the shirt hanging out of the pants. The socks are a pale blue, the shoes are white patent leather. The fuckin shoes are too small for him. He goes through the shoes lined up around the bed, looking inside for sizes. His own shoe size is 10½B, he finds a pair of 11’s and puts them aside, and then he finds a pair of 10’s, and he tries on first the 10’s and then the 11’s and decides the 10’s feel better. They are brown shoes, and they don’t go too well with the white pants and the polyester shirt, but that’s life, sweetheart.

The door opens.

A woman comes into the room.

“Hi,” she says, and smiles.

“Hi,” Colley says.

“I’m looking for the loo,” she says.

She is wearing an orange beach coat and high-heeled cork-soled wedgies. Long tanned legs, hair like a rust-colored mop. She has brown eyes and she wears orange lipstick that matches the beach coat. There is green shadow on her eyelids.

“Leaving so soon?” she says.

“I just got here,” he says.

“I’m Lili Shearson,” she says, and sticks out her hand.

“Steve Casatelli,” he says, and takes her hand awkwardly.

“I’d love to chat a while,” she says, smiling, “but I really have to tinkle. Is that it?” she says, indicating a door, and going immediately to it, and opening it. She sighs in anticipated relief, does a sort of Groucho Marx glide into the bathroom, and locks the door behind her.

Colley leaves the room at once, coming down the carpeted steps into the carpeted hallway. He cannot go out through the kitchen again because he told the black woman he was going to take a swim, and you don’t take a swim in white slacks and a blue-and-green polyester and cotton long-sleeved sports shirt. He wishes he could wait for the woman in the orange beach coat to come out of the bathroom to chat with him. He would love to chat with a woman who calls a toilet a loo, and a piss a tinkle. He wonders if the blonde in the white string bikini talks like that. He finds what he thinks must be the front door of the house, and he opens it and steps out onto an oval gravel driveway.

There is a pale-blue Cadillac sitting right in front of the house, the engine running. A woman is getting out of the car on Colley’s side, and a man is getting out on the driver’s side. A kid in blue jeans and a striped T-shirt is holding the door open for the woman. She smiles at Colley as she gets out of the car. He smiles back nervously. The man comes around the car and says “Hi” to Colley, and Colley says “Hi” back. The kid in the blue jeans says, “Be with you in a minute, sir,” and the man says to Colley, “Roger Lewis,” and sticks out his hand. “Steve Casatelli,” Colley says, and shakes hands with the man. “My wife Adrienne,” the man says. “Nice to see you,” the woman says. They both nod and smile and then go into the house without ringing the doorbell. Colley starts walking up the driveway.

The kid is parking the blue Cad on the road that runs past the house. There are a half-dozen cars parked in the oval driveway, and another dozen or more on the road. Colley figures he can drive away from here in style if he is willing to add a grand-larceny auto to what the cops already have on him. Counting the diner this morning, they have him on two separate counts of armed robbery, one in New York, the other in Jersey, and they have him on what they will probably call murder one, though it was actually self-defense, and they also have him on assault one in New Jersey, for shooting the cook who came at him with the cleaver, though that was self-defense too. So he figures adding the grand-larceny auto to all the rest isn’t going to make a hell of a difference, one way or the other. He has the feeling, in fact, that since nine o’clock last night, when he returned that cop’s fire and shot him dead in self-defense; since that minute and that second, nothing he’s done and nothing he’s about to do is going to change the situation in the slightest. He isn’t particularly worried about this, he figures Que sera, sera. So he continues walking up the driveway, knowing he is going to steal a car. When he was a member of the Orioles, they used to steal cars all the time, but only for joy-riding, dump them in the city someplace after they were done with them. It was easy stealing cars back in those days, but not as easy as it is going to be today. Today he is going to be handed the car of his choice on a silver platter. The kid is running up the driveway to meet him. “Yes, sir,” he says, “which one is it again?”

“The brown Mercedes,” Colley says.

The kid frowns, looks at him as if he’s wondering if this is the same guy who drove up in the brown Mercedes. But Colley stares him down, and the kid turns and runs to where the Mercedes is parked right at the head of the driveway. By the time Colley reaches the big brick pillars flanking the drive, the kid has the car started and is standing outside it, holding the door open on the driver’s side. The kid still looks puzzled. He is probably certain now that Colley isn’t the man who drove up in this car, and he is probably also beginning to wonder if Colley is the man who was earlier wearing the white slacks and the polyester shirt. But Colley hands the kid a buck, and the kid says, “Thank you, sir,” and smiles, and keeps holding the door open until Colley is inside and fastening the seat belt. He closes the door then and stands back a few feet, watching Colley as he eases the car out into the road.

The car smells of real leather. It is a rich smell, he luxuriates in it. He has not driven a car since he got out of prison. He began breaking parole a month and four days after his release from Sing Sing, but the one thing he has not done in that time is drive an automobile because he does not want to get stopped by a cop on a traffic violation and be unable to show him a driver’s license. The car he is driving now is a 280SL, a ’63 or a ’64, he’s not sure which, but a discontinued model either way. Probably cost eight or nine thousand dollars new, bucket seats in beige leather, stick shift on the floor, AM/FM radio — he turns on the radio now, stabbing at one of the buttons and getting a rock station, and then pushing in another button and getting a station playing an opera. He remembers his grandfather going to the opera in Brooklyn all the time. The car has a convertible top, he is tempted to lower the top and drive along with the wind in his crew cut and the sounds of the opera flooding the countryside. It is a beautiful countryside he drives through. He forgets for the moment that he is running from the law. He feels instead that he is out for a late-afternoon drive. He looks at his watch, sees that it is still four o’clock, and remembers that it’s stopped. The dashboard clock reads 6:10.

In a little while it will be dark.

He desperately needs a gun.

Before this he has used guns only aggressively, to force people into doing things he wanted them to do, to force people into giving him things he wanted from them. Now, at 7:48 p.m. on the dashboard clock, he wants a gun only for defense. He is afraid that something terrible is going to happen to him if he does not get his hands on a gun soon. He knows that there are probably two very angry people back there at the pool party, the one whose clothes he stole and the one whose car he stole — unless they are one and the same person. He knows the police have undoubtedly been called by now, and he knows they are probably looking for the stolen car this very minute, but he is reluctant to get rid of it until he has a gun.

All that remains of the afternoon sun is a thin line of vibrant purple behind the silhouetted hills. As he drives northward and eastward, the sky and the hills blend into one. There is a moon, a slender silver slice hanging against the blackness. His headlights have meaning now, they pierce the darkness ahead, picking out shops, and roadside stands, and gasoline stations, all of them closed — this is Sunday. He glances at the fuel gauge. The tank is a quarter full. In the glare of the headlights he sees a phone booth on the side of the road, and he pulls in alongside it, and then steps out of the car and walks quickly to the license plate at the rear. The plate is a Jersey plate, pale yellow and black, the police undoubtedly have the number. There is a clean pressed handkerchief in the hip pocket of the slacks he stole, and he takes that out now and tents it over his hand and gingerly unscrews the bulb illuminating the license plate. He throws the bulb aside, and then steps into the phone booth.

If this was New York City, there’d be no telephone directory in the booth. Also, the phone wouldn’t be working. Also, somebody would have pissed on the floor. But this is Jersey, and when he closes the door of the booth the light comes on, and there’s a directory on the end of a chain and the booth is clean and he figures if he wanted to make a phone call, he would stand a very good chance here in this booth. In New York City the odds are thirty-to-one you will never get to make a phone call from a public booth. It is nice of the police to have a special number to call when you want to report a crime. Trouble is, you go into a booth the phone is always out of order. Colley sometimes thinks there is a bunch of guys just like himself running all over New York City fucking up the phones. So if later they’re committing a robbery or a burglary or mugging an old lady in the street, nobody can pick up the phone and dial 911.

He opens the directory to the yellow pages at the back of the book. There are two pages with the heading GUNS at the top. One of them reads GRAVEL-GUNS and the other one reads GUNS-HAIR. The listings start near the bottom of the first page, under the heading GUNS & GUNSMITHS. There are four listings on that page, and six on the following page. Colley rips both pages out of the phone book. Then he puts a dime in the slot and dials the operator. When she comes on he tells her he is on the highway someplace, and doesn’t know exactly where he is, and could she please give him the location of this phone booth, what town it’s in. She tells him where he is, and he thanks her and hangs up, and then goes to sit in the car with the interior light on, to study the ten listings for GUNS & GUNSMITHS.

There is only one listing for this town. A place called Richard’s Gun Rack, Inc. The address is 76 Rock Ledge Road. He snaps off the overhead light, puts the car in gear, and begins driving north again. Probably going in the wrong direction, Rock Ledge is probably someplace behind him. He passes two closed gas stations, an Exxon and a Mobil. He passes a closed diner, looks just like the one he held up this afternoon, except it doesn’t have those big aluminum poles out front with the open 24 hours sign. Finally, he comes to a shopping center with everything closed in it but a tavern.

The juke box is playing a country-western song when Colley walks in. He takes a stool at the bar and waits for the bartender to discover him. At the other end of the bar, there is a man wearing a pinkie ring that sparkles even in a place as dim as this. A girl wearing a black dress is sitting on the stool next to him. She almost fades into the background except for her frizzy blond hair. The bartender nods at something the girl says, and then comes over to Colley.

“I’m looking for Rock Ledge Road,” Colley says.

The bartender nods. “Keep going north till you come to the third stop light,” he says. “That’s Main, goes straight through the middle of town. You make a right, you’ll go two more stop lights, and then you’ll make another right, that’s...”

“What are you telling him, Lou?” the guy with the pinkie ring says.

“He wants Rock Ledge. I’m sending him down Main.”

“He’s better off taking Lakeview.”

“Too complicated.”

“Shorter, though.”

“You go the way I’m telling you,” the bartender says to Colley. “Third stop light, you make a right, then you go two more lights and make another right. That’s Pointer Street. You go four blocks on Pointer, that’s Rock Ledge. What number did you want?”

Colley hesitates, and then lies. “One-oh-four,” he says.

“You’ll have to make a left, I think. Where’s one-oh-four Rock Ledge, Andy?”

“Down around Osborne, I think,” the guy with the pinkie ring says.

“Yeah, you’ll have to make a left. That’s mostly stores on Rock Ledge,” the bartender says. “You’re not looking for a store, are you? Cause this is Sunday, you know.”

“No, it’s not a store,” Colley says.

“There’s houses, too, on Rock Ledge,” the guy with the pinkie rings says. “Tony from Newark used to live on Rock Ledge.”

“Who’s Tony from Newark?” the bartender says.

“Tony from Newark, what do you mean who’s Tony from Newark? Tony from Newark.”

“You mean Tony who lives on First Avenue?”

“Yeah, Tony who lives on First Avenue.”

“You telling me he used to live on Rock Ledge?”

“That’s right, he used to live on Rock Ledge.”

“It’s mostly stores on Rock Ledge,” the bartender says to Colley, and shrugs.

“Well, thanks a lot,” Colley says.

“He don’t know who’s Tony from Newark,” the guy with the pinkie ring says to the girl. The girl lights a cigarette and says nothing. On the juke box, there is a click, a pause, and then Sinatra comes on singing “My Way.” Colley thanks the bartender again and goes outside.

The car starts immediately, he is beginning to like this sweet little wagon. His mother always tells him he has expensive taste, and she is right. She is not right about too many things, his mother, but she is certainly right about his taste. There is nothing he would like better than to live in the kind of house he stole the clothes and the car from, swim in a pool with a blonde in a white string bikini, take her to the Copa afterwards, show her off. Drive up in this sweet little wagon, doorman’ll say, “Good evening, Mr. Donato,” give the guy a five-dollar tip, go inside and show off the blonde. Wear a big diamond on his pinkie, like the one the guy in the bar was wearing just now. Flash it around. Colley doesn’t care much about clothes, but jewlery, yeah, and good food, and expensive liquor, yeah, he could enjoy that kind of life, all right. Maybe when this is all over, when the heat cools about the cop, he will do a big one someplace. Maybe go West, knock over a bank in a hick town out there. Not Texas, those Texas Rangers are cocksuckers. But someplace out there. Some hick town. Maybe in Kansas someplace. Walk in, shove the piece in the teller’s face, you probably could knock over one of those hick banks with a cap pistol. Cops out there wouldn’t be like New York cops, fuckin bastards. Cops out there’d be sitting with their feet up on the desk, fanning themselves with a cardboard fan. The phone rings, somebody tells them the bank’s just been held up. “Yeah?” the cop says. He’s probably a sheriff. “Yeah?” he says, and swings his feet off the desk, and looks around for somebody he can make a deputy — was that the second stop light just then, or the third? Colley’s thinking about holding up a fuckin bank, and he’s losing track of the stop lights. He hopes it was only the second one. There’s another one up ahead, and if that’s where he’s supposed to turn, it’ll say Main Street.

He peers through the windshield, sees the street sign on the comer — it’s Main, all right. He makes the right turn, and starts counting stop lights again. At the second light he makes another right turn and that’s Pointer Street, just like the bartender said. Four more blocks to Rock Ledge, there it is, there’s a Full Stop sign on the comer. He brakes the automobile, he looks in both directions, he is being a perfect little driver in this sweet little wagon, and he is beginning to feel as cheerful as a whore on payday because he is about to find Richard’s Gun Rack, and he is about to break into it and steal himself a deadly weapon. A death machine. Maybe a P-38 like the one he emptied into the dog. Or maybe a .45 automatic, he likes that gun, too.

He discovers in a minute that he’s heading in the wrong direction. The number on the corner was 125 and the numbers are moving up instead of down, he has reached 137 before he discovers he’s made a mistake. Not his mistake, actually, he’s only following the bartender’s directions, it’s the bartender who made the mistake. He drives to the next corner, the streets are almost empty even though it’s only eight o’clock by the dashboard clock, eight o’clock on a Sunday night in a hick town in New Jersey, there probably won’t even be an alarm system at Richard’s Gun Rack. The light on the comer is red, he waits it out, he is doing everything by the book. He is just a law-abiding New Jersey resident out for a drive in his brown Mercedes-Benz, cruising Rock Ledge Road in search of an open pizzeria. He makes a right turn, circles the block, comes down to Rock Ledge again, and makes a left. The numbers are dwindling now, 118 and 116 and 114, he passes the comer, he is in the 90 block now and then the 80 block and finally he comes into the 70 block.

76 Rock Ledge Road is in the middle of the block.

GUNS the sign says.

It is a big white sign over the entire front of the shop.

GUNS.

There are two plate-glass windows flanking the entrance door of the shop, and there is nothing on either of these windows but the single word GUNS again, lettered in gold leaf on each window. There is nothing about this being Richard’s Gun Rack. Guns are what the man is selling and that’s what it says on the big white sign in black letters, and that’s what it says in gold leaf on each of the plate-glass windows: GUNS.

Colley has come to the right place.

He continues on past the place, though, because if the cops in this hick town stumble onto the hot Mercedes, he wants them to find it outside a paint store or a beauty parlor and not outside the place he is in. He parks the car in the 60 block, in front of a store selling radios and phonographs and television sets and stereo equipment. The television set is going in the front window. Owner probably left it on over the weekend because there are millions of people milling over the sidewalks here in this thriving little metropolis. A night baseball game is on. It is the Mets and some other team, Colley can’t make out the uniform. He watches for a minute, and then starts back toward the gun shop.

The sidewalks are deserted.

There are rifles in both windows of the shop, with cartridges spread all around them as if they were gold coins spilling from a pirate’s chest. Colley searches the plate glass for the metallic strips that will tell him the place is wired. He cannot find any, nor are there any burglar-alarm stickers on the windows. He wishes he knew more about burglar alarms. He knows guys can tell you exactly what kind of alarm is in a place just by taking one look at any exposed wire. Some systems, it doesn’t matter if there are exposed wires hanging all over the outside walls, because if you cut a wire the alarm goes off anyway. But he doesn’t see any strips on the windows here, and as he circles the building, going through the alley on the side of the store and around to the back, he can’t see any wires or bells or anything that would indicate the place has an alarm system. He can’t believe it, a gun shop that isn’t wired. There’s a door on the back of the shop, glass panels in the upper half of it, a deadbolt showing on the outside. That’s in case anybody smashes the glass, they can’t simply reach in and turn a bolt and open the door. This kind of lock, you need a key to open it even from the inside. No metallic strips on the glass here, either. Is it really possible?

He tries a flatfooted kick at the deadbolt, hoping to spring the lock, but the door doesn’t budge an inch. This is what he hates about this kind of shit. When you’re doing a robbery, you just walk in the front door and throw a gun on the man, and that’s it. Here you have to go fooling around with locks and trying to break into a goddamn place, anybody’d go into burglary has to be out of his mind. He doesn’t know what to do. If he breaks the glass panels, he won’t be able to unlock the door because of the deadbolt. And even if he breaks out all the glass and the wooden frame, the opening will still be too small for him to crawl through. There are guns inside this fuckin shop, he can taste them.

He comes through the alley again, looking for a window, and he finds a small one high up on the wall, probably a bathroom window. Loo, she called it. I’m looking for the loo. If he can open that window, he can get inside the shop. He goes around back again to where he saw a garbage can alongside the door, and he carries the can into the alley with him and stands on it, and tries to open the window. He can see the street at the end of the alley. A single lamppost illuminates the sidewalk, but the alley itself is in darkness. There is no traffic on the street. In the darkness, in the silence, he works on the window, trying to raise it. He wishes he had a screwdriver or a knife, but he has neither. There are probably tools in the trunk of the Mercedes, he should have thought of that, but he didn’t know he was going to have to open a window. He’s half thinking of forgetting the whole thing. But there are guns inside there.

He climbs down off the garbage can, and then takes the lid off, and turns the garbage can upside down, and climbs onto it again. There is garbage all over the alley floor now, but it’s not rotten food, it’s clean garbage — little cardboard boxes that cartridges come in, and newspapers and gun-company brochures, crap like that. Colley plans to smash the window with the lid of the garbage can. He will smash the upper pane of glass just above the inside latch, and then he will reach in and unlatch it. He is afraid that maybe the place is wired, after all, maybe with one of those new sonic alarms where they put microphones around and if a door or a window is opened or anything is smashed, whoever’s listening picks up the noise and calls the police. He is afraid that when he smashes the window a bell will go off. He is also afraid that when he smashes the window he will get glass splinters in his eyes.

But there are guns inside there.

He brings back the lid of the garbage can. He is holding it like a shield, and he smashes it flat against the glass and the glass shatters, making a racket he is sure they can hear all the way in the Bronx. There is no bell, only the sound of the glass shattering, but his heart begins to beat wildly anyway. He waits in the darkness. He is sure someone has heard the breaking glass. He is sure someone will yell Hey, what are you doing there? “There’s houses, too, on Rock Ledge,” the guy with the pinkie ring said back there in the bar. Colley waits. A shard of glass falls from the window frame and shatters on the alley floor. It sounds like a cannon going off in church. He waits and listens. Nothing. He reaches in and turns the latch. He opens the window, crawls in over the sill, and comes through the bathroom into the shop.

There are guns everywhere.

He has never seen so many guns in his life. There are rifles and shotguns in racks on three walls of the shop, and there are handguns in cases along two of the walls and also in a center case that has an aisle on either side of it. Light from the lamppost outside splashes through the two plate-glass windows, glinting on blued steel barrels and walnut stocks. On both plate-glass windows, Colley sees the word GUNS backward. He reads it as SNUG, and he smiles. Yes. Yes, he feels snug and cozy inside this shop, he could stay in this shop forever. The shotguns and rifles in the wall racks stand like soldiers at attention as Colley inspects the revolvers and automatic pistols in the cases. There are Remingtons on the wall, and Springfields, and rifles and shotguns he cannot immediately place. But he knows each and every handgun in the cases.

He can never remember the names of all the seven dwarfs, but he knows all these guns by name. Silently, he rolls the names on his tongue. The names echo sonorously inside his head. Lovingly, like a poet reading his own work, he recites the names in silent reverence — Colt and Llama; Bernadelli; Smith & Wesson, Crosman; Ruger and Savage; Steyr & Derringer; Hi-Standard; Iver Johnson. He knows the models, he loves those names, too — the Buntline Special and the Buntline Scout, the Commander and the Agent, the Chiefs Special and the Centennial Airweight, the S & W Terrier and the Sidewinder, the Trailsman and the Python. There is a Walther P-38 in one of the cases, identical to the one he used to kill the dog, and there is a .357 Magnum — Jesus, it is a monster gun. He would be afraid to hold that gun in his hand, afraid it might go off accidentally.

He takes his time deciding which gun or guns he will finally choose. He is like a child in a toy shop on Christmas Eve, and his father has said to him he can have any toy in the shop. He can hardly remember his father, he wonders why he thinks of his father at this moment. But he does feel childlike here in the midst of all these pistols of varying sizes. The cases are locked. With the stock of a rifle he smashes the glass on the case in the center, and then reaches into it and begins trying various pistols for grip and heft. He has carried many of these guns in the past, but some of them are new to him, and he examines each with care and discernment. Here is the pistol he shot the cop with last night, he does not want that hoodoo jinx of a gun again. And there’s the gun Jocko was using, and there’s the .32-caliber Smith & Wesson that Colley left in the glove compartment of the pickup truck. He passes a boxed pair of Number 4 Derringers, be a nice gun for Jeanine, she could tuck it in her G-string, fire off a shot with every bump and grind. He wonders where she is. Fuck her, he thinks.

He keeps coming back to the Magnum.

It is some gun, bigger than any of the others in the case — well, bigger than any of the real guns. Some of the target pistols and early Western reproductions have longer barrels, but the Magnum, a Ruger Blackhawk, has got to be what — ten or eleven inches overall length? Has to be at least a six-inch barrel on that weapon, has to be.

He is afraid of picking up the gun. He guesses it isn’t loaded, but he has never held such a huge weapon in his hand, and he’s fearful of it. He moves down the case to the Walther, and he picks it up, the heft is familiar, he knows this gun, it saved his life this afternoon when that fuckin hound was chewing on his arm. The arm feels pretty good now, he is beginning to think that maybe he won’t die of rabies, after all, even though the doctor told him it would take forty days for the first symptoms to appear. He has already forgotten what the first symptoms will be. Doc, Dopey, Sleepy, Happy, Droopy, Dumpy and Doc, he thinks and bursts out laughing. He is beginning to feel very giddy and silly here inside the gun shop with the light shining through from the lamppost outside. He doesn’t think he wants another Walther, maybe he’ll take the Government Model Colt. But he keeps drifting back to the Magnum.

That is some big gun.

He picks it up. Blackhawk is some name for a gun. It sounds like an Indian. His hand is trembling as he picks it up. It’s a heavy gun, it weighs a little more than two pounds. It’s got a walnut grip with an emblem on it just behind the trigger, looks like a bird in flight, must be the Ruger trademark. He hefts the gun. He rolls out the cylinder to make sure it is not loaded. Then he rolls the cylinder into the gun again, and pulls back the hammer with his thumb, and squeezes the trigger.

Click.

It is as if he turns on a red light. He squeezes the trigger, and he hears the click and the red light goes on. It takes him a second to realize he has not caused the sudden red illumination, it is not his squeezing the trigger that makes the light go on. The light is coming through the plate-glass windows of the shop. The light is red, the light is flashing, the light is the dome light on top of a state trooper’s car.

The first thing Colley thinks is Yes, the place is wired, it is one of those sonic jobs, and then he thinks No, it is probably a neighbor who heard the glass smashing, and then he realizes it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, they have got him cold inside here, he is standing here with a huge pistol in his hand, but the pistol is empty, he is standing here naked. The trooper who gets out of the car is a big black bastard. He is wearing the trooper hat and the trooper boots, and he is coming toward the front door of the shop. He has his gun in his right hand and a long torchlight in the other hand. As he approaches the door, a second car pulls into the curb, and then a third one. Two of the cars are state police, the other one belongs to the local fuzz, this is a three-alarm fire here. Colley can see through the two plate-glass windows, and it looks like a movie taking place on two big screens that have the word SNUG written on each of them.

“Watch it, there he is!” one of the local cops yells, and the trooper who got out of the second car throws his light through the window into the shop. The second trooper is white. Colley sees this the instant before the light comes on. He also sees that the black trooper is taking aim along the length of his arm. It is just like the liquor store last night: the bastards are going to start shooting at him, and he is going to have to kill one of them in self-defense. But the gun is empty. The gun in his hand, the big fuckin gun that can tear off a man’s head, has no cartridges in it.

The movie screens up there are splintered with light now, everybody is throwing light onto the glass and it is splashing all over the shop, there are guns everywhere. There are guns inside the shop, on the walls and in the cases, and there are guns outside there on Rock Ledge Road where two state troopers and two local cops are waiting to shoot him dead, he wonders if they know he killed a cop last night. Light is bouncing all over the shop, he can see only guns and light, the plate-glass windows splintering first with light and then splintering with the impact of the bullets that come leaping out of the darkness. The glass shatters, he has never heard such noise in his life, the sound of the guns going off outside and the sound of the glass shattering and then the sound of something angry buzzing past his ear, he must do something, they are trying to kill him.

Instinctively, he fires back with the empty pistol. He hears a dick and another click, and he keeps squeezing the trigger, and he sees the big fuckin gorilla nigger cop taking steady aim again, and he thinks No, you don’t! and fires the empty gun at the trooper, and then sees a flash of light from the muzzle of the trooper’s gun, and hears the explosion, and wonders if the trooper is firing a Magnum same as he’s firing, click, click, and the trooper’s shot takes him in the face.

In the last instant of his life he wonders what they will tell his mother, Jesus what will they.