Alex left the bar, his eyeballs floating. The horizontal hold had gone on the room, and he could feel the fajitas moving in his stomach. He wanted fresh air. The jammed jukebox, playing that one song over and over again, had proved resistant to the barman thumping it, and after letting it play the same song for fifteen minutes the guy had finally gone and pulled the plug, with some violence, out of the wall.
Neil Young had stopped, and the circular riff of Alex’s own thoughts had continued: hate and fear, anger and grief, grief and hate, anger and fear, salt, pepper, vinegar, mustard…
Alex left the bar and turned away from the Strip and walked. Behind him, a shadow calved off from the shadow of the doorway and crept down the dark lee of the building, skipping occasionally through pools of light and back into darkness.
Alex wasn’t hard to follow. Sherman had had an hour to sober up. Alex had had an hour to get drunker. He was staggering like a cow that had been hit with a hammer, away from the bright light, into the darkened residential streets, dragging his tail behind him.
Alex stopped at the edge of a bare lot. They were building something there.
A rough fence of corrugated iron had been raised around it, the gaps covered over with panels of metal netting, through which you could see an uneven expanse of bare dirt, pocked and pitted. Blue-white lights on tall poles scored it with sharp shadows. Orange construction vehicles slept like dinosaurs in the cold lunar daylight.
Sherman stopped behind him. Alex put his hands on his knees, bent forward, rocked back and forth over the ground with his mouth open. It looked like he was going to be sick, but then whatever it was passed. Alex spat, instead, a long spool of saliva descending to the blue ground.
Then he resumed his progress, not once looking back, slipping through a wide gap in the fence and ignoring the signs that enjoined him to wear a hard hat. Sherman followed, stopping at the edge of the site in a pool of darkness cast by one of the tall panels. It was bright as day in that site, but dark outside. If the boy was bait, this would be a perfect killing zone. He didn’t want to move in until he was sure he was alone.
He watched Alex move with the aimless deliberateness of the seriously drunk. He seemed to be talking to himself. Then Sherman saw him double back towards him. He ducked his head behind the corrugated-iron sheet and stepped further into the dark. If the boy came out through the gap, Sherman would have the drop on him. He waited.
Then he heard a zip go, and the loud drum roll of someone pissing like a horse against the other side of the fence. A pool of hot urine leaked from under the fence and spread around Sherman’s shoes. The smell was pungent. If the boy was setting him up he was no sort of professional.
Step in and shoot? Let the kid die with his dick in his hand?
On second thoughts, if there was an accomplice, now might be exactly when he would anticipate Sherman making his move. Maybe professional was exactly what he was. So far the boy had done absolutely everything he could, seemingly, to invite Sherman to murder him. He had got drunk. He had shown no sign of even looking around to see if there was anyone following him. He had walked off to a deserted construction site, brightly illuminated, with clear sightlines in. And now he was taking a pee.
The gap in the fence spilled light. There was no way this sort of thing happened by accident. Hold back.
Sherman listened patiently. It ended, and Sherman could hear Alex walking away, further into the site. Sherman waited a long time, and then, finally, followed him.
Alex sat down on a short stack of wooden pallets. He had at last lost his self-consciousness. He snivelled, miserably.
‘What am I going to do?’ he asked the empty lot. ‘What am I going to do?’ He didn’t mind much if he died right there. His mouth was foul with whiskey. He felt sick, but it wouldn’t come up. He wanted to go home and sleep forever. He wanted Carey. He wanted to die. He wanted his mum. He didn’t know what he wanted.
He took his phone out, and looked at it, and put it away again. He wondered if he might be going mad.
Sherman moved out of the shadow of the fence and into the light. He moved quietly, on the balls of his feet. His gun was in his hand. Alex was half turned away from him, staring into the far corner of the lot, where one of the lights was out and the adjacent two-storey building left that side in darkness.
There was a sort of generalised sobbing and wailing going on. Sherman knew at that moment that this was more elaborate than he’d have needed for a set-up. There was no accomplice. This had been nothing to do with MIC at all.
Alex sobbed again. The lad was upset – anyone could see that. And Sherman felt sorry for him, whatever his problem was. But Sherman still intended to shoot him in the face.
He waited until he was close enough to be sure of making a chest shot in a hurry.
‘You,’ Sherman called. ‘Boy.’ Alex was still looking away. He made no acknowledgement.
‘Alex!’ he called. Slightly louder. The boy’s head turned in surprise.
Who? Alex saw a man with a gun. He stood up suddenly, feeling very sober. It looked like the man who had chased him at the supermarket. The gun was pointed at him.
‘Yeah, pal. You.’ Alex gave a sudden jolt of fright. Seconds ago, when in no prospect of doing so, he had thought he perhaps wanted to die. Now, presented with a golden opportunity, his body chemistry was telling him the opposite. He discovered that he did not want to die at all. The whiskey vanished from his system. He was sober, and terrified.
‘Alex Smart,’ said Sherman. ‘You’ve caused me a lot of trouble, lad. A lot.’
Alex struggled to say something. He had never had a gun pointed at him before. He said: ‘Whu-whu-whu-whu-’
Sherman stepped forward and Alex yelped. ‘Easy,’ said Sherman. ‘Hands where I can see them.’
Hands where I can see them? Sherman thought. Does anybody actually say that?
Hands where I can see them? Alex thought. They say that. They actually do say that.
Alex realised he had had no idea where his hands were. He discovered that they were straight out in front of him, as if his unconscious had decided it was possible to fend off bullets by the act of protesting politely against them, like someone refusing a canapé at a party. Please don’t. I couldn’t possibly take a bullet in the gut. I’m watching my weight.
Alex’s hands shot up level with his head.
‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Whatever it is, I’m sorry. I don’t know what you think I’ve done, but I – I think you’ve got the wrong person, sincerely, sir.’ The whiskey hadn’t entirely worn off. Alex struggled to pronounce ‘sincerely, sir’.
‘You’re Alex Smart?’
‘Yes. I mean no. Sorry. Yes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to lie. I mean. I got confused.’ Alex was breathing fast and shallow. Terror made everything very clear to him. He could see Sherman’s sandy hair and hard little face – or, at least, he was aware of them. All he literally saw was the little black hole in the end of the gun.
He talked to Sherman and looked at the gun.
‘I’m Alex Smart, but you must mean a different Alex Smart, I mean. There’s been some sort of mix-up. I’m a student.’
‘Are you?’ said Sherman. ‘That’s nice for you.’
‘I’m at Cambridge. I do maths. I don’t do…’ He trailed off helplessly. He didn’t know what it was he didn’t do, or – rather – how to articulate the mass of things that people presumably did do that led to people pointing guns at them, but that were so far outside the sphere of all the things Alex did as to occupy a separate category of existence.
‘Cambridge, eh? Mummy and Daddy must be very proud of you,’ said Sherman, in a not altogether friendly way. ‘But I’m afraid I couldn’t give two shits what you do or don’t do. Not two shits. You’ve got this machine. It’s not your property. And I want it back.’
Alex was even more baffled. What machine?
‘I don’t know, sir. Please. I don’t know what you’re talking about -’
I don’t know what you’re talking about, Alex thought. I actually said that. That’s what people always say in films, and they are always lying, and something very horrible always happens to them.
‘- I mean, sorry, I know how that sounds, I really don’t know, I promise I don’t. I don’t have any machines. Please. You can search me and everything. Just please don’t -’ and he couldn’t bring himself to utter the words ‘shoot’ and ‘me’ out of the fear that it might put an idea into the man’s head which would not otherwise have occurred to him.
Overhead Sherman could hear the sound of a helicopter. It flickered through his head that he should run – that that might be MIC come to disavow him, or the FBI come to take him in – and then he put the thought out of his head and concentrated on killing the young man who he believed had killed his friend.
Sherman hadn’t liked Davidoff, not that much. But a point of principle was, as he saw it, at stake. Davidoff had been in his regiment. He had been beside Davidoff when they were digging into a position in the Iraqi desert under fire, and discovering they were on top of a mass grave had given each of the sandbags they filled a name: Abdul, Mustapha, Mohammed. They had spent a night dug into that position. This soggy little prick knew nothing of that. And the only thing that would get Sherman out of the hole he was in with his employers and with the law was in this lad’s possession.
‘Please,’ said Alex.
‘No,’ said Sherman. He took a step closer to Alex, who had raised his hands, palms out, like a hostage in a black-and-white film. ‘Mate, the way I see it is this. You killed my friend. You have this coincidence machine. And this is nothing personal but I’m fed the fuck up asking nicely.’
Sherman had at no point asked nicely, it occurred to him fleetingly. But he kept the gun level. This was not personal. No. It was personal. He gestured with it for Alex to move – down the fence towards the unlit corner of the site, further into the shadow, further away from the human noise of the street.
‘I – I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Alex. ‘I’ve got money. Please. I can help you. Please.’
It was as Alex went, stumbling sideways down the fence line, that Sherman realised the boy had suffered a failure of imagination. He didn’t realise that Sherman meant to kill him – or if he did realise it he was not allowing himself to believe it. He thought he belonged to a different story. His was a world in which people didn’t kill each other, except in foreign countries and on television. At some level, this little twat thought that one day he was going to be telling people about this.
It made Sherman hate him – but also envy him. This wet, spoilt, selfish, privileged little wanker. Sherman was not only going to kill Alex, he realised then, but he wanted to.
If he’d kept his eyes on Alex, Sherman would have seen that realisation communicate itself to the young man he was about to kill. He’d have seen a face, streaked with drying tears, turn to fear and bewilderment. Alex in that instant knew, for the first time, what it was to be properly hated; to be hated to death.
Sherman would also have seen Alex’s eyes, an instant later, attempt to focus over his shoulder on a pudgy woman in early middle age emerging from the far corner of the yard, followed by a tall man with grey hair. The woman had a gun in her hand.
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.’
Jones’s eye spooked a little. He looked afraid again, held her gaze as if she was what was holding him to the world. And then the pupil of his eye ballooned until the grey iris was the width of a fingernail paring, and he was looking at nobody.
Bree was still there on her knees beside him, stroking his sticky hair and bawling, when the ambulance showed up twenty minutes later and with nobody to save.