I am having trouble breathing. “Are we going now?”
He shakes his head. “We’ll wait until the game breaks. The more confusion, the better.”
When it’s time. Heather’s father says, “Get yourself frosty. They won’t go easy.”
“You can tell that by watching them stand on a street corner?”
“That’s right,” he says. He taps his middle finger against the handle of the gun in his waistband. “Let’s go have a little roughhouse.”
In the lobby we fall in step with a group of gray-suited corporate lawyers and pass with them through the enormous revolving door. Outside, the street is seething. The sidewalk in front of us is a sea of bobbing heads. We move with the crowd.
I am peering over the people around me, watching the Jamaican leaning against his flower cart on the opposite sidewalk. He is staring into the crowd, trying to keep sight of the door. Heather’s father is directly in front of me, crouched slightly, also watching the Jamaican.
Heather’s father glances at me over his shoulder. He says, “Cross at the corner. We’ll take him as soon as we hit the other side.”
I nod. Everything seems far away. I no longer feel shoulders jostling against mine. I no longer feel feet scraping the backs of my heels.
I imagine what would happen if a V-shaped flight of F-4S passed over us and dropped flaming orange sheets of napalm. I see the commuters around me turn black in the heat. I see their melting faces. I imagine an earthquake in which the skyscrapers above us disintegrate into a concrete avalanche. I imagine a world without skyscrapers where we would huddle close together and wait for lions or saber-toothed cats to charge us from the underbrush. We would scatter, lungs burning, tingling-hot all over from the adrenaline burst, and the lions would go after the youngest or the sickest or the weakest and they would bring him down with airborne strikes that break his legs and they would rip him apart.
I imagine meteor showers.
We are almost to the corner when I see Kelly. He is in a second-story window across the street. I do not see his rifle. He nods to me.
I lean toward Heather’s father. “We may have a problem,” I say.
“You mean your boy in the window?” he says. He does not turn around.
“You saw him.”
“When we got out here.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t know it was an issue.”
“He may not be a friendly,” I say.
“Is he a hostile?”
“Possibly.”
He turns his head now. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
We have reached the corner.
I say, “I believe there’s been a series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations.”
“Leading to what?”
“Kelly is probably going to try to kill you.”
He stares at me. “Why would he do that?”
I don’t say anything.
Heather’s father says, “Because you told him to?”
The light changes and we begin moving across the street.
“I’ve recently come to reexamine some things,” I say.
When Kelly appears next to me, Heather’s father is still on his knees. The smaller Jamaican is lying next to the flower cart. There is a hole in the center of his face. His cheeks are caved in toward it. The big Jamaican is on the ground next to us. On the ground next to him are the white and gray and blue-veined coils of his guts. He has been cut nearly in half by the exit wound from Kelly’s hollow-point. His face is smooth and unmarked. His eyes are wide open.
Kelly says, “Let’s get what we came for.”
“I don’t think this is what Heather wants.”
“Sure it is. You said so.”
“I know that. I think I made it up.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Yes,” I say.
He shrugs. “I suppose it doesn’t much matter. It was never really about her.”
“What was it about?”
“Getting back to nature.”
Heather’s father says, “You don’t have to do this.”
Kelly draws his pistol. “Don’t flatter yourself. It was never really about you either.”
I say, “You’ve already made your progress. You don’t need this.”
“We need to finish what we started.”
I shake my head. “You’re being too literal.”
“It’s what separates us from the animals.”
“I thought what separated us from the animals was that we know we’re going to die.”
“What separates us from the animals,” he says, “is our ability to ask what separates us from the animals.” He aims his pistol. Heather’s father closes his eyes. “The danger,” Kelly says, “is to become all talk and no action.”
I close my eyes before I lire — holding low, squeezing-not-pulling — so I do not see Kelly’s face when the bullet hits him. I imagine him looking at me with enormous, shocked eyes and reaching out his hand and taking a shaky step toward me and I fire again and again with my eyes closed until I hear his body fall.
He is still alive. He sounds like he is trying to clear his throat. I imagine the way he looks on the ground, flopping like a landed fish, drowning in the air.
I turn away before I open my eyes.
Heather’s father is leaning against me. We are shuffling along Purchase Street, trying to seem casual. I have draped my jacket over him to hide his shoulder. Taking the jacket off revealed my gun harness, so I unstrapped it and threw it in a garbage can on Federal Street. I have the pistol in my pants pocket.
There are sirens everywhere now. The cruisers are stuck in the traffic from the Central Artery construction site. The sidewalk is full of people who do not know what has happened. We are lost in the crowd again.
Heather’s father drags himself along, stepping as lightly as he can so as not to jostle his shoulder. We do not speak.
Heather is sitting in her Mercedes with the line of taxis in front of South Station.
She says, “Get in.”
I open the back door and help her father inside and slide in next to him. Heather pulls away from the curb.
Her father says, “Where are we going?”
“What is he doing here?” Heather says. “What’s wrong with him?”
“It’s sort of a long story,” I tell her. “We can’t go home.”
“No,” her father agrees.
“We need to get out of the city for a while.”
“What if they shut it down?”
“The whole city?”
“They could.”
“But they don’t even know what to look for. They don’t know what we’re driving.”
“Chancy,” he says.
Heather’s father closes his eyes and leans against the back of the seat. We creep onto the bridge beside the Children’s Museum and sit in the steaming line of stopped cars.
Heather’s father is taking deep breaths.
Heather turns her head toward me. “Do it,” she says.
“Do what?” I say.
“Kill him.”
I feel the inside of the car begin to spin. I open my mouth but no sound comes out.
“What’s wrong?” Heather says.
“I thought I imagined it.”
“Imagined what?”
“That you asked for this.”
“Why would you think that? This is what you wanted.”
“Me?”
“You said you wanted to take care of me.”
“I do.”
“Then he’s served his purpose.”
“So he has to die?”
“You want me, you want money. He has both. I want a man who doesn’t ask for everything. I want a man who takes.”
“Are you sure you want this?”
“Really, I want it for you. I want you to feel like you can be the man in my life.”
I rub my neck.
“I’m establishing my independence,” she says.
Heather’s father says, “You must know she’s crazy.” His eyes are still closed.
“Shut up,” Heather says. She turns back to me. “Kill him.”
“I don’t know,” I say.