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to his feet. Once on them, he glared around at everything, seeing nothing.
I took a step or two toward him, but before I could get there, one of the women who’d asked me if
I’d like a date came swaying up on stiletto heels. Only she wasn’t a woman, not really. She couldn’t
have been more than sixteen, with large dark eyes and smooth coffee-colored skin. She was smiling,
but not in a mean way, and when the man with the bloody face staggered, she took his arm. “Easy,
sweetheart,” she said. “You need to settle down before you—”
He raked up the hanging tails of his shirt. The pearl-handled grip of a pistol—much smaller than
the one I’d bought at Machen’s Sporting Goods, really not much more than a toy—lay against the pale
fat hanging over the beltless waistband of his gabardine slacks. His fly was half-unzipped and I could
see boxer shorts with red racing cars on them. I remember that. He pulled the gun, pressed the
muzzle against the streetwalker’s midriff, and pulled the trigger. There was a stupid little pop, the
sound of a ladyfinger firecracker going off in a tin can, no more than that. The woman screamed and
sat down on the sidewalk with her hands laced over her belly.
“You shot me!” She sounded more outraged than hurt, but blood had begun to spill through her
fingers. “You shot me, you pissant bugger, why did you shoot me?”
He took no notice, only yanked open the door of the Desert Rose. I was still standing where I’d
been when he shot the pretty young hooker, partly because I was frozen by shock, but mostly because
all of this happened in a matter of seconds. Longer than it would take Oswald to kill the President of
the United States, maybe, but not much.
“Is this what you want, Linda?” he shouted. “If this is what you want, I’ll give you what you want!”
He put the muzzle of the gun into his ear and pulled the trigger.
12
I folded my handkerchief and pressed it gently over the hole in the young girl’s red dress. I don’t
know how badly she was hurt, but she was lively enough to produce a steady stream of colorful phrases
she had probably not learned from her mother (on the other hand, who knows). And when one man in
the gathering crowd moved a little too close to suit her, she snarled: “Quit lookin up my dress, you
nosy bastard. For that you pay.”
“This pore ole sumbitch here is dead as can be,” someone remarked. He was kneeling beside the
man who had been thrown out of the Desert Rose. A woman began to shriek.
Approaching sirens: they were shrieking, too. I noticed one of the other ladies who had approached
me during my stroll down Greenville Avenue, a redhead in capri pants. I beckoned to her. She touched
her chest in a who, me? gesture, and I nodded. Yes, you. “Hold this handkerchief on the wound,” I told
her. “Try to stop the bleeding. I’ve got to go.”
She gave me a wise little smile. “Don’t want to hang around for the cops?”
“Not really. I don’t know any of these people. I was just passing by.”
The redhead knelt by the bleeding, cursing girl on the sidewalk, and pressed down on the sodden
handkerchief. “Honey,” she said, “aren’t we all.”
13
I couldn’t sleep that night. I’d start to drift, then see Ray Mack Johnson’s sweat-oily, complacent face
as he blamed two thousand years of slavery, murder, and exploitation on some teenage kid eyeballing