But Sherman saw none of these things because he was disconcerted by a sudden movement in the corner of his field of vision. Distracted for an instant, he looked down. There was a faint, blurred rectangular shadow on the pavement around him, about the size of a Volvo estate. The shadow was getting crisper and smaller, Sherman thought. And that was the last thing Sherman thought.
Sherman was standing there and then Sherman was gone – vaporised, obliterated.
At first nobody in the yard could process the sound. Offensively abrupt and shatteringly loud, it had a quality of being at once percussive and muffled, like a fat person’s thigh bone snapping clean without breaking the skin.
Bree had been aware of something flickering in the upper corner of her field of vision and then, with a tremendous WHUMPH! and a tangible dislocation of the air, what she had been looking at had become without preamble what she now was looking at, and it made no sense.
The man with the gun was gone, and where he had been was an oblong block on the ground at the centre of a great asterisk of red. There was black stone and polished wood of some sort dashed to matches, and a spreading stain of bright blood. Down both long sides of the oblong, great fat pillars of wood stuck up skywards. Two, at the end that took the impact, had snapped off and shivered. One of them bounced and rolled away over the uneven ground. Meanwhile, fugitive pieces of what used to be Sherman were crumbed in the dust of the yard like meat scraps in the sawdust of a butcher’s floor.
Alex’s mouth opened and closed. His hands remained in the air.
Bree looked at the scene. The impact had sent fine brown dust in every direction, and Bree’s next breath caused her to cough. A torn skein of green felt, poking out from under the edge of the table, was soaking black with the blood.
Bree was the first person to talk, and she said: ‘The fuck?’
Jones, standing slightly further away, said: ‘Snooker table.’
Jones was right. What had landed on Sherman was a brand-new, full-sized slate-bed snooker table. It had cost twenty thousand dollars and weighed something approaching a ton and a half. It had been destined for pride of place in a newly built ‘Sherlock Holmes’ suite at the MGM hotel and casino, whither the helicopter that was carrying it had been bound before its cargo had parted company with its bindings.
All this took approximately three-quarters of a second, and that fragment of time was crowned by an instant of tranquil bewilderment. The dust hung in the air, and there was silence.
Alex’s hands remained in the air. Bree gaped. Then Bree looked down and saw a bit of Sherman on her boot, and as she was bending over to be sick the stillness was broken by a sound like the crack of a pistol. Something powered into the centre of the oblong like a little howitzer and shattered into dust. Then another crack, equally loud. Then another – something, this time, kicking off the oblong and skittering across the uneven surface of the yard, something round and red.
Then another – CRACK! – and another – CRACK! – then the same sound but softened, without the hint of ricochet. Bree could see something blurring out of the sky and punching into the dirt in the floor of the yard. It looked like an apple. She had a fleeting image of the way hailstorms used to begin when she was a kid.
Bree flinched as if she were under fire. Then she felt a sharp agony in her hand and her gun flew out of it and onto the ground. Her arm felt as if she’d been hit on the funny bone with a sledgehammer. A round red apple bounced over the yard. She hunched, thrusting her sore arm into her armpit and bringing the other up to protect her head. Then she felt another whistle down behind her, and another, and two more red apples snapped into existence half buried in the dirt of the yard. Snap, snap.
Then a yellow one. Then a green one. Then a brown one.
Jones was still standing, looking puzzled, when a blue snooker ball struck him on the top-right corner of his forehead, a quarter of an inch below his hairline. The orbit of his right eye collapsed, and blood exploded from his face.
Behind Jones a pink ball punched into the dirt.
Jones flopped forward and landed on his knees. His hands were by his sides. His mouth was open. His cigarette fell out.
A couple of feet further on a black ball hit the concrete in which the fence was set and exploded into dust.
Then Jones’s whole long body pitched face first, waist still unbending, into the dirt. He came to rest like that, his head looking down the length of his shoulder across the ground to where Bree was half crouched, expecting at any moment to be struck dead by some kind of English sporting goods travelling at terminal velocity.
The hailstorm stopped. Again, there was silence – though it was the anticipatory and untrusted silence of a pause in shelling.
Jones’s legs, still bent at the knee, subsided in a succession of ragged jerks to the horizontal. His mouth opened. Blood was pooling, under the influence of gravity, in the corner of his shattered eye. It flowed over the bridge of his nose and trickled thickly into the corner of his undamaged eye. It looked almost black in the artificial light. His mouth closed.
Bree, picking herself up, her hand still buzzing agonisingly from the impact – one of those balls must have hit the barrel of the gun she was holding – ran-stumbled towards where Jones was lying.
Alex was standing where he had been standing, not more than a body’s length or two from the wreckage of the snooker table. His hands were still in the air.
Bree shouted ‘Stay there!’ at him but he didn’t show any signs of having heard her. He wasn’t going anywhere. He had been chased, and newly shot at, and heartbroken, and rescued from death by a falling snooker table. Now he was out. Not computing. Just staring into space.
Bree reached Jones and knelt beside him. The uneven dirt of the lot was hard through the knees of her slacks. She put her hand on his shoulder. His mouth opened. His unbroken eye shifted focus to look at her face. He looked confused. And he looked, for the first time, afraid.
‘Easy, Jones,’ Bree cooed to him. ‘It’s all right. We’re going to get you an ambulance. Ambulance is going to come, and pick you up, and we’re going to get that eye -’
Jones blinked, and a smear of blood tinted the white of his eye pink. His mouth closed.
‘- get that eye looked at, get it fixed up, an’ – we’re – don’t try to speak – just getting an ambulance right now -’
She felt panic getting a hold on her. She fought it. She realised she needed to call, needed to call a fucking ambulance – her hands were shaking. She pulled out the cheap cellphone she had and stabbed at the keys, mistyped twice, hit 911, composed herself as she spoke to the dispatcher.
‘Yes, corner of – that’s right – it says -’ she read the street sign she could see – ‘down an alley at the yard in back. We’ve got – yes, badly injured, something fell on him. Hit him on the head. Come quick.’
She returned her attention to Jones. Absently, maternally, she realised that she had been stroking his hair. Her hand was sticky with blood. He flapped his mouth again, then half coughed a syllable.
‘Not,’ Jones said.
‘Don’t try to speak, baby,’ Bree said. She could see the blood, the shattered skull. Jones was dying, right here, right in front of her. ‘Don’t try to speak. Everything’s going to be all right. The ambulance is coming. The table got fucko. We won. The good guys won.’
‘Not alone,’ Jones said, and she realised that what was in his eye was not fear but imploring.
‘Don’t worry, Jones. Not alone, no. I’m right here with you. Not alone.’
The blood from the wound in Jones’s head passed in a runnel down the corner of his jaw. It dripped from the bridge of his nose. Bree was down low, looking into his good eye, nearly on the ground, trying not to think about the mashed part of his face where the ball had hit. ‘Not alone,’ she said. ‘I’ll be with you all the way. In the ambulance. Ambulance is coming. Coming now. Not alone, baby. Not alone.’