Salvatore had never seen anything like it. Mr. Fratelli’s head just seemed to fly apart as though a bomb had gone off in his brain. When Salvatore started to run, his mind hadn’t yet settled on exactly what he was running from. It didn’t matter, because he managed only one step before the next blast found him.
Wolf trotted toward the woods, wiping off the shotgun with his handkerchief. He was systematic about it, moving from the barrel to the stock and back again, then taking another pass and ending up holding the shotgun with the handkerchief near the muzzle. He dropped the shotgun in some bushes, then turned to run through the woods toward his car. He had owed the old man a debt he couldn’t pay off with money, but now it was over. They could never be even, but he had done all that had been left to do, and now he had to get out.
He was still feeling dazed from the loud roar of the shotgun and the tremendous kick it had delivered; he hadn’t fired anything like it in years. The shots he had taken outside the old man’s house had somehow been muted by anger and outrage, so he had not been prepared for the way the shotgun had torn up the cool, quiet air of the park.
As he moved through the woods, he thought he heard something. It was a faint, steady rustling like the sound of a wind blowing through the wet leaves on the ground, but he could feel no breeze on his face. He stopped, stood beside a tree trunk and waited for the sound to resolve itself into something he could identify. He stared through the trees in the direction of the sound. Beyond them he could see the silvery gleam of the tiny lake, the white front of the museum on the other side and then a car’s headlights on the distant road. It was moving along at about thirty, and as it made a turn its headlights swept across the little woods. Then he saw the men. There were three of them about twenty feet apart, shuffling along slowly through the trees. The car turned again and the light disappeared just as the one in the middle fired. The bullet thumped into the tree above his head, and stung his cheek with a spatter of bark and dirt.
He knew that ducking or diving to the ground wouldn’t save him. He had to run, and hope that the trees and the darkness, distance and difficulty they would have in planting their feet for a steady shot would give him a chance. Of course a man like Angelo Fratelli wouldn’t be out here in the dark with one man and a corpse. It was ridiculous.
He considered going back to look in the bushes for the shotgun, but he knew he would never make it. The gun was hidden badly enough so that the police would have no difficulty finding it in the morning, but they wouldn’t have people shooting at them, and this wasn’t morning. He concentrated on his immediate problem, which was that in a moment he was going to run out of trees. He would have to dash across what looked like a picnic area under a few stately old maples, and when he did it he was going to be a hard target to miss.
He kept running. He could tell from the sounds that he was putting some ground between himself and two of his pursuers, but the one directly behind him was having an easier time of it because he could run exactly where his quarry did without stepping into a hole or crashing into a tree trunk. Wolf broke into a sprint to give the man a chance to get ahead of the others. At the edge of the grove he saw something that gave him hope. To his right was the old brick wall of the zoo, covered with ivy and skirted by uncut brush. The top of the wall was protected by old-fashioned foot-long steel claws that curved inward, looking as though they had been put there to keep a lion from jumping out, but probably designed to keep morons from climbing in.
Wolf stopped; made a quick pivot to the right and reached into his pocket. The only heavy objects he had were the extra shotgun shells. He listened for the approach of the pursuer, then threw four of the shells as high into the air as he could. Their trajectory carried them up and over the wall before they began to fall. They came down to the right of the first man, and on the other side of the wall.
Wolf waited behind a tree for the sound of the shells hitting. When it came, he was pleased. The first one hit with a heavy thump on a surface that sounded like concrete. Then the others came down in a group, and there was a dull, grating noise as they rolled down some kind of incline. It was as though he had set off a weird perpetual-motion machine.
When the first man appeared, Wolf could see he had heard the sounds. He was small and wiry, and from his silhouette and speed, Wolf judged that he was young. The man stuck his pistol into his coat pocket, jumped up and grabbed the curving bars at the top of the wall. But just as he pulled himself up to peer over the wall, something big on the other side made a decision. The something big was a male polar bear named Caesar. He had been born in the zoo, so he had no idea that the reason he was half crazy was that polar bears hadn’t evolved to occupy small concrete pens with tepid swimming pools painted aquamarine. First there had been the two loud blasts, then a smaller one. When the pieces of metal and plastic had fallen from the sky into his enclosure, he had stopped cowering in the dank concrete pillbox he used for a den and come out looking for something to maul. When he reached the edge of his pool, he saw that the intruder was only a bunch of cylindrical shiny objects rolling off his patio into the deep moat that kept him at home.
When Caesar saw the ridiculous sight of a man hoisting himself up on the bars above the wall, it made him angry. He stood up on his hind legs, spread his forelegs and, with a tottering, staggering gait, trotted quickly toward him, baring his fangs and uttering a loud, deep, groaning noise from somewhere inside him. The sound was part joy at finding something close enough to take a swipe at with his powerful forepaws, part anger because he knew that usually when he did this they raised a little black one-eyed box and flashed something bright in his eyes and part frustration because even if he killed it, he would probably never get to eat it. Caesar was just going through the motions; still, as his huge form waddled forward out of the darkness, it was nearly nine feet tall, glowing white in the moonlight, and appeared to be composed mainly of claws and teeth.
The man on the wall bared his teeth too, but it was only because he needed to open his mouth wide to let out a scream. Instead of simply letting go of the curved steel rods, his arms gave a reflexive push to get him as far away as possible from the charging apparition, and his legs pushed off the wall too. He took the weight of the fall on his shoulder blades and lay there for a second with the wind knocked out of him, unable to move. He had forgotten about Wolf for the moment, but when he remembered and drew the conclusion that lying on his back across the protruding roots of a maple tree was a good way to commit suicide, Wolf was already looming at the edge of his vision. The kick in the head didn’t kill him, but it brought the same sudden explosion of pain and an approximation of the same darkness to shut down his brain.
Wolf reached into the man’s coat pocket and extracted the pistol, then stepped back behind the tree to scan the woods for the next pursuer as the bear let out an anguished cry of disappointment behind his protective wall. Wolf had no idea what kind of animal made that kind of noise, but it had to be huge and it wasn’t happy. The sound brought the other two men closer. He could see them slipping from tree to tree, waving and nodding at each other in turn to provide cover for each movement.
Wolf waited for a clear view to present itself. He ran his hand over the fallen man’s revolver to identify it, but could tell only that it was probably a .38. He tried to remember how many shots its owner had taken at him, but he wasn’t sure. Then the man on the ground began to come to life. First there was a gasp, then a groan, just his body making a sound to celebrate having some air it could take in and let out again. Then the man’s brain began to struggle to reassert itself. He said loudly, “Ooooooh,” then, “Oh, boy.” Wolf glanced at the man. There still was no movement, but he wouldn’t shut up because he still hadn’t regained enough of his consciousness to remember where he was.