Colley watched the blood. He did not know whether the blood was really moving quite that slowly, or whether this was the same phenomenon that took place in the liquor store at nine tonight, or nine yesterday night, whichever. He always thought of the empty hours of the morning as part of the night before; to him, it was still Saturday till the sun came up and then it would be Sunday. On Sundays, every Sunday when he was a boy growing up in Harlem, and later when they’d moved to the Bronx, he’d gone to ten o’clock mass, stopped going when he joined the Orioles and began doing bad things. This was technically Sunday already, though he was still thinking of it as Saturday night, and he was indeed going to church, but the church was wet and dark and the devil was the preacher. He’d seen the devil behind Jeanine’s mirthless eyes, heard the devil’s laughter echoing up out of her bowels, forcing itself onto her mouth, laughter exuberantly evil, reveling in the dark and brutal act that had just been committed. Slowly the stream of blood oozed its way toward the open doorjamb.
You live by the gun, you die by the gun.
That was Albert L. Donato speaking, noted Buick salesman and criminal psychologist. Jocko lived by the gun, yes, but tonight he died by the knife, and now he was on that kitchen floor dribbling out the last few drops of his blood while a stranger entered the cloister, gun in hand. Not a stranger, though. His good buddy, his fall partner, the man who went in with him on each and every job, sharing the danger and the fun, the man who was now sharing the wet and secret places of his wife, who, incidentally, happened to be the person who tore his flesh to dangling ribbons... Christ, those tubes in his throat — was that the jugular, was that the trachea? Was that what the throat of Luis Josafat Albareda looked like after Colley shot him that time so long ago? His first gun. An Astra Firecat, a fucking peashooter, how could it have caused so much damage? Luis Josafat Albareda speaking through a voice box now, his Spanish accent sounding absurdly like the voice of Señor Wences: You want to go back in the box?
From behind countless footlights over the years, strutting in high-heeled, ankle-strapped shoes across hollow noisy stages, blue smoke rising, eyes on the tasseled G-string as she twirled it, blond tangled hair behind it, Jeanine promised sex unequaled, she promised skill and passion, hours and hours of unending excitment — she would take you where you’d never been, you would spend a steamy night with her in the devil’s own chamber. Now she was going to deliver. Now she was going to honor all those markers she’d been handing out since she was sixteen years old, all those I.O.U.’s that were still unpaid. She was going to make them good now on this couch in this apartment where five minutes ago she’d committed bloody murder.
Colley thought of guns. His brother once told him that the pistol was of course a fixed psychological symbol, that whenever a man dreamt of a gun or even thought of a gun he was actually dreaming of or thinking of a penis. Colley wondered if his brother called his own cock a penis, or did he only use that word when he was discussing guns as fixed psychological symbols?
Colley loved guns, there was no question about that. He remembered his various guns now as Jeanine whispered in his ear, urging him to explode inside her. She’d killed one man in the kitchen by stabbing him to death with a fourteen-inch blade, and now he suspected she wanted to kill another one here in the living room by fucking him to death. He sensed it would be dangerous to leave this woman unsatisfied; sooner or later she would remind him of it in ways that might be unpleasant. What had been unconscious ten seconds before she whispered in his ear, commanding him to come — Give it to me, baby, let me have it — now became entirely conscious. Willfully, he thought of guns. Lovingly, he thought of their parts.
He thought of them as engines.
He thought of them as death machines.
He’d disassembled enough of them to know that their design was basically simple. He thought of that design now, concentrating on what caused the explosion in the barrel of a pistol, refusing to obey her whispered urgings, knowing he could not himself explode inside her or he would one day pay for it. She herself was paying all her markers, and perhaps that’s all she wanted or needed to do — please him, satisfy him, leave him basking in the afterglow of her methodical assault. But he felt certain she was testing him somehow, having utterly destroyed a man bigger and stronger than himself and wanting now to reduce him similarly, coaxing and teasing and tormenting from him an orgasm he refused to release. He was afraid of leaking his juices into her vault. He was afraid that would be the same somehow as Jocko leaking his blood onto the kitchen floor. She suddenly rolled him off of her. She sat up.
Her mouth descended.
In the simplest of pistols, like the Colt .22 Derringer, there were only seventeen parts, and you could assemble the gun from scratch for about twenty-five dollars. In a more complicated gun, like the German Luger, there were fifty or more parts. Colley knew the names of the parts, he’d seen them spread on a clean white cloth in front of him, pieces of a deadly jigsaw puzzle. Front sight and breech block, toggle joint and firing pin, trigger bar spring stud...
He was frightened now. His mind frantically grasped for other names, breechblock catch link rivet, he was responding to something as primitive as his grandmother’s fear of the number thirteen, believing that if he allowed himself to succumb to her mouth, she would destroy him more completely than she’d destroyed Jocko. She would devour his parts, she would drain him of his vital juices, she would suck from his cock the manhood he’d protected and preserved for twenty-nine years. There was nothing subtle about her attack now. She no longer wished to tantalize with slow bumps and grinds learned on rickety stages in smoky saloons. Her breathing was labored as she worked him liquidly, he was melting into her mouth, he was losing himself to her, he twisted his head violently...
In any gun, the cartridge sat in a narrow metal shaft. It was composed of case, primer, powder and bullet. When the trigger was squeezed, the spring action caused the firing pin to strike the back of the cartridge case, denting it and simultaneously causing an explosion of fulminate...
She lifted her mouth for just an instant.
“Come, you son of a bitch,” she whispered.
... igniting the powder and propelling the bullet from the shaft.
Six
She was cutting his hair.
He was sitting on a chair they had pulled in from the kitchen, and a dishtowel was draped over his shoulders while Jeanine worked on him. He was facing the open doorway. The trickle of blood had stopped. He could hear the ticking of the clock, he still did not know where the clock was. His hair kept falling onto the rug as she snipped away with the scissors. They had not bothered to put newspapers on the floor around the chair; they were going to leave the apartment soon and nothing could be any messier than the corpse they were leaving in the kitchen.