The shot was like a pneumatic spring compressor. It was not the sound I was expecting. It went ptou! An obscene, single-syllable French word. I had my eyes closed by then, and heard a heavy slumping to the ground. I murmured a thought in my mind: And May God bless. Oh Christ… May
God bless.
When I opened my eyes after no second shot, was fired John was still kneeling. He was looking at the floor right beside him, dumbfounded. Laura Kincaid was on the floor. She was doing a horizontal waltz there. She was dying. I couldn't figure out why. I saw a flicker of movement out of the comer of my eye. Schilling was gone, rushed out the small doorway that ended in darkness. He'd killed her, perhaps to take the loot for himself. I looked back at the woman on the cement floor four feet away. Part of her throat was missing. It was pale white: fish-belly white. The white that no healthy skin ever gets.
And then the paper-white rift under her jaw grew dark. It oozed bright red. The whiteness was from the shock of the slug as it passed through her flesh, driving all the blood far away from it. But the, blood came back through the thousands of tiny blood vessels, and now poured forth faster and faster. There was no big spurting; no artery had been severed. But I soon heard a sound from her that will haunt me for the rest of my days. I'd heard it before, when I was a kid, on an Iowa farm. They had slit a hog's throat, and beat it with sticks to keep it running around the yard so its heart would pump all the blood out. And I heard screams coming through the blood. Underwater screams. Underblood screams.
Laura Kincaid, what was left of her, kicked and slapped herself around on the cement like a sea turtle at a Caribbean marketplace. She flapped and flipped, and made ugly noises. She was nowhere near dead and suffering terribly. The wound in her throat had cut her windpipe, and she was in enough pain so her jaw was clenched shut. She breathed through her wound, and screamed and cried through it too. A huge football-shaped mass of brownish-red froth rose up from it, bubbling like perked coffee.
It was so ill-fitting for the pretty slim lady I had met in the big elegant house. It was so-clumsy. So embarrassing. In a grotesque way it was as if she had just stumbled at a debutante ball, or thrown up on somebody's priceless Nahin rug.
"Oh pardon me," her soul seemed to be saying, 'I'm sooo sorry-you see, I cannot help it. I'm dying… and it hurts and there's nothing I can do."
She swung her head, now pale gray-blue, back and forth hard against the cement floor. Then she settled down and grabbed at herself all over with her hands, whimpering. She was doing a slow, sad side stroke into eternity.
Then they came.
I didn't notice either of them until I smelled the faint sweet reek of whiskey.
The taller one stepped forth with his pistol. He aimed, at the thrashing woman. Much as I hated her, I would be glad when he ended it.
His partner ran over to the small doorway where Jim Schilling had disappeared. He flung his head snakelike around the edge for a millisecond, then flung it back inside. I saw his arm flicker, and heard a tremendous crashing boom, then two more. The noise was so loud I could feel it in my chest. His right hand held a huge revolver in stainless steel. He held it deftly, cradled it casually as if it were a water pistol. I didn't like these guys at all.
The man stayed put in the doorway, glancing back at the three and a half of us.
The big man nearest me wore a navy blue pea coat. His face was scary because it was a caricature of a face, one you might find on a totem pole. The brown ski mask was decorated in coarse, wide-weave patterns that bespoke Navaho, Aztec, Eskimo-the American aborigines in general. His partner's mask was pure dark wool, a balaclava helmet that covered the entire face except for an eye slit. He looked like a medieval executioner. In fact he was.
The big man breathed heavily, odoriferously, and stared down at the thrashing form. He heard the thick bubbling from the tom throat, the muted scrape of skin and flesh on rough cement.
"For God's sake, man," whispered John.
The big man glanced quickly at John, as if temporarily distracted, then turned his gaze back to the woman on the floor.
"Thank your stars we've saved you, O'Shaughnessey. Say a prayer of thanks and be done with it. You know who I am. If you interfere now I'll put you away, same's we put the coont here away."
He aimed the pistol at Laura Kincaid again and I thought he was going to end it.
But he didn't. He seemed to enjoy watching her.
"Brian McGooey" he said to her.
I don't think she heard him.
"Michael Tomlins," he said.
Nothing but more of the same.
"Patrick Cahill."
Nothing much at all now.
"Bernard Upshaw; " said the other, "and Eamon Dmmele, Sheila Coone, Aden Berry-" PTOU!
The man fired, and Laura Kincaid's left kneecap exploded. The men in ski masks leaned over her as she thrashed in the immense pain of it. A great dark wet stain spreadin her crotch. Still, they did not put her away. The room and the world rocked by me. I saw John's face dimly in the background. It had a look of profound sorrow.
Laura Kincaid had but a few seconds; she kept up her pitiable, spastic, and partnerless dance until, with a grunt, the taller one pushed his foot into her twitching form and shoved it into the hole.
"And now," he said turning in my direction, "who in blazes might you be?"