Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (34 page)

Derrick spots blood leaking out of a hole over the top of her left breast. “He got you in the tit?”

She bites her lip against the pain, her chin trembles.

“Well, drop that fucking gun before I put a hole in your other one,” he says.

She lets the gun fall on the floor. Then she puts her hand on the bullet hole and takes it away, as if she can't quite believe that its real, being shot. She winces, blood stringing between her fingers and shirt.

Derrick picks up the gun. He drops the magazine, checks it, and slams it back in his pistol. Then he eyes her wound. “Keep pressure on it,” he says. “If you bleed everywhere, you ain't gonna leave me no choice but to shoot you.” He looks around the room. “Where is he?”

She juts her chin at the bed. Then her eyeballs flicker up in her head.

Cirillo is wearing nothing but a white T-shirt, his cock red and half erect under the purplish swell of his stomach. He's holding a full-size Colt .45 1911 of his own, standard issue in World War II as well as Vietnam. Lou only shot him once, but it was a good one, right through the nose. Derrick estimates the angle and finds the brass casing from her round. It looks like Cirillo returned fire in a death reflex, his gun almost dead sideways in his hand. Derrick finds the casing in the bedding.

Without the brass casings the forensic officers won't be able to match the pistols' firing pins to the rounds fired. Derrick takes Cirillo's gun out of his hand, field strips it, extracts the barrel, then does the same to his own gun. Then he trades barrels, reassembles them, and puts Cirillo's gun back in his hand. If forensics can match the rifling of the barrel to the bullets, they'll now all come from the gun in Cirillo's hand.

He looks the crime scene over. It's a murder-suicide now. There'll be the missing casings, sure, and there'll be plenty more problems as the police go through the scene. But murder-suicide will be the easiest explanation, and the rest'll be chalked up to inexperienced investigators. After the riot, neither the district attorney nor the chief of police are going to hurt themselves trying to find out who killed the dumb sonofabitch.

Lou's passed out in the chair. Derrick grabs her up and slings her over his shoulder. She shudders, mumbles. He carries her out as gently as he can.

When she comes awake, she tries to move her arms first, and then her head. But she can't. Her black eyes go wild like a captured bat, fluttering around the room. Then they land on Derrick. “Oh, Jesus,” she tries to say, but she chokes on the blood overflowing in her mouth. “What are you going to do to me?”

“You doped me,” Derrick says, trying not to hide in the shadows left by the kerosene lantern he's hung on a nail in the wall. He's got her tied to a kitchen table, deep in one of Over-The-Rhine's Victorian ruins. “You conned me and you doped me.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she says, “It hurts.”

“I'll take care of that,” Derrick says. “But first I want to tell you what you did. You can just nod along.”

Her eyes roll back in her head and her lips drain of blood, and Derrick thinks for a second that she might lose consciousness, but she returns, nodding.

“Down in niggertown, Cirillo's like the white devil, ain't he? He rousts you, abuses you, beats you. Steals all your dope and takes his kickbacks in money and nigger pussy.”

She nods.

“You and the vet, Everette Anderson, you figured you'd get rid of him?”

She nods.

“You set me up for the suspension. That was one of your people? You knew Cirillo hated my guts, so you gave him an excuse to discipline me. To give me a motive.”

She nods.

“And while you were doping me so you could steal my gun, Everette Anderson was organizing that riot. Then him and a couple of your Fanon-toting niggers drove me to riot central. You figured even if I survived, I'd be out of my head when I finally surfaced. And by that time the police would already have my gun.”

She nods.

“It's so cockamamie it just might've worked,” Derrick says. “The only place you fucked up was in thinking any little nigger riot could kill me. I've worked real war. There is no war here.”

She spits blood at him, but she doesn't have the force. It falls back on her face, splattering all over her cheeks and mouth. “It's war to us” she says.

Derrick pulls out his pliers and a knife. Then he finds his syringe. It's taken more time and money than he should have spent to come up with that loaded syringe.

She blinks in pain.

“I can't leave my bullet in you,” he says. And he sees himself in the curvature of her iris. Black and hoary and somehow pitiful in the greatcoat, like a small and terrified boy playing at war. He holds up the syringe. “This is for the pain,” he says stupidly.

And he has no idea how she gets her hand free. Nor where she'd hidden the little .25 pocket pistol. But she thrusts it right into his stomach and pulls the trigger until the slide jams against his flesh.

Derrick has no way of telling how long its been when he wakes into the complete blackness of the boarded up room, the camping lantern long extinguished. Nor how long he sits against the wall, listening to the creaking of the building around him, the skittering of animal feet. He coughs blood into his fist and then makes the mistake of reaching down to the horrorshow at his lower abdomen.

And then he's gone again.

When Derrick returned from Vietnam there were days he would lay on his bed in the cabin sunup to sundown, drinking bourbon and watching shadows slide down the walls. His father could understand the trauma of war, even seemed hopeful of it, but Derrick allowed of no trauma. He lay on his bed because there was nothing for which to move, and he drank bourbon because he liked to.

Which lasted exactly two weeks. Until a dinner of pork chops, which his father had cooked in an iron skillet, wearing one of his gray department store suits with a dish towel draped over his shoulder, where he said to Derrick, “You are not the first young man to return from war.”

Derrick was barefoot in jeans and a tattered undershirt, hacking a pork chop into chunks and swallowing them whole. He grinned up at his father without answering.

His father's mustache raised, and then dropped. And then raised again. “This,” he said, and stood and reached for a volume on the shelf.

A younger Derrick probably would have removed one of the many guns on the walls and shot the old man in the face. But it turned out that war had changed Derrick some. So, when he quit laughing, he walked back into his bedroom and packed his few things into a duffel bag.

This time, Derrick makes himself move. He drags himself half upright and lights the lantern. Then he stands like that for a while, hunched over, until he can work up the strength to unscrew the can of gasoline he'd brought with him and kick it over.

He makes it out into the street before the whole building catches afire, but he makes it no further than the street before the billowing smoke opens a hollow around him and swallows him whole.

And then he dreams. He dreams of Lou, of the gap in her teeth, of her voice speaking gently to him from above. He dreams that he's chasing her through the narrow alleys of Over-The-Rhine, chasing her to retrieve his bullet, which he knows she'll always carry inside her. But he also knows in his dream, just as he will know later in waking life, that he'll never catch her.

He dreams for what seems like days, and probably is. He dreams right up until he wakes up in the hospital bed, howling.

Rick Dakan

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