The Perfect Death

FIFTY-NINE

Tony Mazzetti brought his car to a squealing halt in front of Arnold Cather’s shop. He saw Stallings’s car and a patrol car in front of the shop. Mazzetti bolted from his car and darted inside. It was empty.

He heard Stallings’s voice. He turned toward the steps, but before he could reach them he heard gunshots from the room at the top of the stairs. It was clear as day. Four quick, individual shots.

A uniformed cop and Patty crouched at the top of the stairs with their guns pointing inside.

Mazzetti drew his gun and took the stairs two at a time.

Sergeant Yvonne Zuni turned down the street where Classic Glass Concepts was located. She felt confident having a veteran like Stallings on the scene but knew that things could get out of control quickly. Over the main radio frequency she heard the emergency alert tone, then the panicky voice of a young patrolman shouting into his radio, “Shots fired, shots fired! Warehouse on Davis.”

Sergeant Zuni picked up the handheld radio from her passenger seat, waited for dispatch to acknowledge, identified herself clearly, and said, “Is anyone hurt? I’m coming down the street in an unmarked Ford Taurus. What is your current location?”

Her calm tone and commanding presence forced the young officer to think for a moment, take a breath, and say, “I’m covering the outside rear of the building. The shots came from inside. I’m headed around front now.”

Sergeant Zuni was quick to come on the radio and say, “Hold your position. I’ll be there in less than one minute.” She couldn’t resist the urge to press the gas a little harder. Experience had taught her to be steady and calm as soon as she arrived on the scene. It was her job to inspire confidence and dissipate panic. But she was only human and she allowed herself a few moments of anxiety as she wished she were there right now.

The gunshots reverberated in Stallings’s ears. Patty and the patrolman seemed to have suffered less having the open shop behind them. Stallings was relieved no one else had fired out of reflex. Often, one cop shooting spurred others. It had been a fact since the Boston Massacre.

Stallings kept his pistol trained on Arnold Cather’s head even after he’d dropped his gun to the ground. The glass structure Stallings had just shot four times was shattered into thousands of pieces. Only the bottom row of jars remained intact and even that had cracks and fissures still erupting.

Cather started to tremble, then weep, and stumbled back against the apartment’s flimsy wall and slid to the ground like he had been shot through the chest. Stallings had figured out that no bullet fired into the man could have caused as much damage as the ones fired into his obsession.

Arnold Cather would never harm anyone again.

Arnold Cather, known to the entire world as Buddy, lost all control of his limbs as he watched his whole world crumble into a pile of useless fused silica. Instead of his life flashing before his eyes, memories of endless hours over the hot furnace, blowing different pieces of the structure and painstakingly making each jar to fit each slot so exactly, flooded into his head. Even the pleasure he had derived from identifying each subject so carefully, then capturing her breath so lovingly, seemed like a dream to him now.

How could that cop be so cruel? How did he know it would hurt him so much to destroy his work of art? He wanted to strike back, but his whole body was fighting just to keep his heart beating. He felt worse at this moment than he had the day he was told he would never recover from the tumors growing in his lungs.

As he bumped the wall, his legs gave out and he slid to the ground with a graceless plop.

Why couldn’t the cop have shot him and saved him all this sorrow?