When he was dying, there in the street, the ambulance still on its way, he started crying.
The cop who'd shot him, kneeling next to him now on the quiet back street, felt embarrassed for him. The cop hoped when his own time came, he didn't start blubbering. Pretty goddamned embarrassing with all these people around.
Anyway, what was this sonofabitch crying about? He was the one who'd escaped from a mental hospital named Hastings House and then brutally stabbed three teenage girls.
But the killer started to sob, and hold his stomach where the cop had shot him. Blood bubbled in the corner of the man's mouth.
And so the cop, cursing, said, "Hold on; you'll make it."
But the man knew different, of course. And so did the crowd of poor black people who'd gathered shoeless in the ninety-degree midnight of the ghetto. Some teenagers had bottles of wine stuffed inside greasy paper bags. Others toked openly on joints. One plump young woman breastfed a tiny, shiny black infant.
The man looked up at the cop and said, with great effort, "I didn't kill them."
The cop couldn't help it He sneered. "Somebody saw you, man. You went right into the women's toilet and grabbed that teenage girl. And an old woman saw you."
"It was me physically. But spiritually it was somebody else."
It was me physically but it wasn't me spiritually. Right. These fkers always had some crazy story.
And the stench; this foul, greasy odour the man gave off. What was the smell anyway?
"Feel my stomach," the dying man said.
"What?"
"Feel my stomach."
"Jesus."
"Please." And the man weakly took the cop's hand and guided it to a place just below his sternum.
And goddamn. The cop felt it.
Something twisting inside the man's stomach. Something alive. Coiling and uncoiling.
The cop jerked his hand back as if he'd been burned.
"He dead, ain't he?" a young boy said peeping down into the man’s face.
The cop looked up at the kid and scowled. "You go stand back on the kerb, you hear me?"
But the kid kept leaning over and peeping down at the man. Blood bubbled from the man's nostrils and mouth and dripped from his chin.
The cop just kept staring at the man's stomach right above the wound.
Something was fucking in there. Moving.
"He dead," the kid said again, but he finally moved back to the kerb.
By the time the ambulance came the man's stomach was still and the cop would be damned if he'd say anything about it to the ambulance attendants or the man from the Medical Examiner's.
He had felt something moving in there. No shit. Honest.
The cop didn't want to end up at Hastings House himself.