Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

He springs to his feet and squeezes off a single suppressed shot at the shadows by the car.

The .44 makes a dry PHUT noise, the gun jumping in Oswald’s hand, and the bullet rips through the night, kissing a divot in the bricks on the other side of the alley. The lawyer is not there anymore. Gone. Vanished. Nothing but empty shadows by the Beamer.

Oswald is thumbing the hammer back when he hears a shuffling noise.

He wheels around just in time to see the dark figure lurching around the dumpster behind him. Three more blasts ring out from the douchebag’s .38 like light bulbs popping in the dark, the bullets biting through the top of the dumpster near Oswald’s shoulder, the hot spit of shrapnel spraying the side of his face and driving him to the pavement.

Oswald lands hard on the ball of his shoulder and he rolls, slamming against the adjacent wall. Another burst of flatulence bleats out of him, and the pain sends stars across his blurred vision.

He still has the Bulldog gripped in both hands and fresh blood stinging his eyes and he can hear his cell speaker chirping softly in his pocket: “Hey Tonto, what’s the deal?—I’m hearing shots and shit.—”

Footsteps scrabbling now, moving fast across the cinders, the sound penetrating Oswald’s ringing ears. The dickhead is dashing back toward his Beamer. Oswald rolls the other way and peers under the dumpster at those expensive Nike tennis shoes shuffling toward the car. Sucking in a pained breath, Oswald squeezes off three more shots.

PHUT!—PHUT!—PHUT!

Three dry pops go tracing across the dark like luminous threads. They chew through the rocks at the lawyer’s feet—Oswald’s aim is thrown by the blood stinging his eyes—the hollow points raising three little puffs of cinder dust near the front wheel of the Beamer as the dickwad frantically claws the door open and leaps behind the wheel.

The sound of the ignition kicking on makes Oswald scramble to his feet with his head spinning and two more rounds left in the cylinder and the faint sound of Gerbil’s voice crackling out of his pocket: “Did you forget the fucking silencer again?—Dude, you gotta get that drinking under control.”

The BMW screams, its engine roaring, the rear wheels burning rubber in a thundercloud of smoke. Oswald lurches toward the car.

The Beamer starts fish-tailing away, and for a split second Oswald considers shooting out the tires, but that would take the remaining two rounds, and then Oswald would have to reload—all this swimming through his brain as he lunges headlong toward the car—and this is when he makes an instantaneous decision: a last-ditch attempt to finish this fucking job.

He grabs hold of the door handle as the car squeals toward the street.

Oswald feels the gravitational force of the vehicle sweep him up like a carnival ride. Somehow, he holds on, his free hand clutching the door handle, his gun arm hugging the roof. His work boots scrape along on the pavement in a wild skate, as the car bursts out of the mouth of the alley, the accelerator pinned, the vehicle going into a skid.

Tires shriek and Oswald nearly slips off, but the window has come down now, halfway, and Oswald manages to lock his massive free arm around the inner frame. His gun hand is still free and he tries his damnedest to aim the Bulldog point-blank at the back of the asshole’s head, but the skid is pressing tremendous g-forces against Oswald’s weight, and it takes all his strength just to hold on.

The Beamer straightens out and then roars down Noble Street toward Grand.

Oswald’s boots are dragging along so furiously now they’re smoking, and he can’t see very well, but he still has that vise-grip death hold on the window frame as they pass deserted sidewalks strewn with garbage from a recent sanitation workers’ strike. The ass-hat behind the wheel is facing forward, yelling something garbled and frantic into the wind, yanking the wheel and trying to shake Oswald off.

The BMW zigzags and crashes into a row of battered garbage cans, Oswald’s flailing legs plowing through the dented metal barrels, the impact sending up a cacophony of noise and kicking trash up into the air like the wake of a mad water-skier.

Oswald holds fast to the roof. He lets out a manic Ho-Chunk war whoop and manages to squeeze off a single shot at the lawyer’s head, missing by a mile, the PHUT tearing through the windshield, spraying a web of cracks across the glass. Diamonds of broken windshield blow back at Oswald, strafing him in the face, as that faint whiny voice keeps crackling from his pants: “We gotta get you into a program, dude.—AA, I mean.—I’m serious this time.—You got a major monkey on your back.”

The muzzle of the .38 appears in the window, and everything seems to slow down.

For an infinitesimal moment—barely a nanosecond in terms of real time—Oswald sees the oily black pupil of that barrel, aimed directly at the bridge of his nose, like an accusing eye, without mercy.

In real life, the moment lasts only for the briefest whisper of time, but it seems to burn itself into Oswald’s consciousness like a digital photograph, as he clings, simian-like, to the side of that speeding car. “Oswald, are you there? Are you like giving me the silent treatment now? That’s, like, real mature—!”

In that last horrible instant before the blast comes, Oswald has no epiphany, no searching moral inventory, no realization of a misspent life, no grief, no regret, no sorrow, not even a mild recognition of the irony of being on the wrong side of the same instrument he has used to cause so many other deaths over the years.

He feels nothing except for one thing: it’s good that he will die before his wife.

The muzzle barks.

6.

Down through the ages, in the sordid history of Chicago emergency services, a few misadventures involving unstoppable bodily forces