There are subtle ways to end a story. Death, loss of a friend, loss of an enemy, or a simple change of mind following a heartfelt conversation. The end comes along and you realize only too late that it came without provocation, without hesitation. It came without warrant and without a second thought. The story is over before you realize you’re in the epilogue, and your friend, your partner, sits across the desk from you with his head bowed to look over the fresh stitches in his arm. Gun shot wounds heal ugly. You can’t tell him this, not then. He’ll learn. You’ll both learn.
I faced the villain on the rooftop under the afternoon sun, his hat in his hands and a smile on his face. The man looked at me as if he were looking at a priest. Guilt seeped through the his pores; he stunk of bad choices. I’m sure I didn’t smell any better.
The gun, a yard away on the gravely rooftop, winked at us with a spark of light from the setting sun. It dared us to make a move. It dared me to be a different man. It dared him to be the same.
I looked at his eyes instead, yellow with malnourishment. Even beneath the man’s hat I could easily see his hair was greasy and thin. The longer I took him in, the less I liked my chances of being able to talk my way out of the situation.
Charlie had pulled every fiber of that standoff from me. He wanted to know how I got off that roof with my life. How we all did; Scoop, the brave, young newspaper jockey and Charlie, the bleeding detective in the shadows of a decrepit staircase. And me, the man who just couldn’t get enough grit under his fingernails.
As we sat in our office with the fixed window and our names painted on the door just like the first day, I told him that if a man is gullible enough to toss away a weapon, he also might be fragile enough to crack. I didn’t regret my decision to come out from behind that vent on the roof. Not then, and not afterward, when blood pooled in the sunlight right next to that gun.
“What do you want?” the man had asked me. I had waited for his mark, and when it came I told him exactly what I wanted.
“I want to take you to jail,” I’d said.
His eyes had dropped to the gun, then to the top of my head. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.
I’d seen that grasping glance before. I admitted to Charlie that if the man dived for his weapon I wasn’t sure what I’d’ve done. Charlie looked at me at first with humor when I’d told him this, then with pity. He knew all too well then that everything we’d overcome on that rooftop, everything we now owed our lives to, came down to luck.
I poured myself a drink and lit a cigarette. All this in a minute, maybe less, but it bought me time where I could sort my thoughts. Charlie needed to hear this, and maybe I needed to say it, but damn it if I would tell my story by someone else’s watch, even my partner’s.
The man on the roof thought for a long time about God knows what. He lifted his hat and scratched at his head. His hands were gnarled and boney. “You expect me to come quiet?”
“Yes I do.”
The noise from the street below grew and the wind whistled across the openings of the pipes sticking out of the roof. The man in front of me started to look away, toward Scoop and where Charlie lay on the dark stairs.
I blew smoke into the air between Charlie and me, watched it wisp away into nothingness against the ceiling of our office.
Steam lofted through the air between the villain and me on the rooftop, steam from the vents that I’d hidden behind when I came out from the staircase.
“I know it looks bleak,” I said and the man’s eye darted to my feet. “We can work this out. But you shot a man, and you didn’t even know his name.”
“I knew his name,” the man had said. “He may have had a few aliases over the years, but Mr. Gorbateski always went back to his roots. And to his daughter.”
“Gorbateski,” Charlie said. He leaned to his right in the chair, careful to not rest his patched-up arm on the arm rest.”That’s the man who bought the shipping yard after it went under. Got it for almost nothing.”
I watched Charlie for a moment, tried to find something in his face. Recognition, maybe, or maybe a clue to lead me to something I’d missed. Or maybe, I was looking for myself.
“You’re trying to figure all this out,” the villain had said to me when he saw my reaction to the name.
“We shot her. We shot him, too, though it was me pulling the trigger on that one. We didn’t need to kill him since we were trying to wound him by shooting his daughter. It just worked out that he was waiting outside when she went in to talk to you.”
“You knew she would come to me?” I’d said.
“’Course we did,” the man had said. “Who do you think put your name in that paper on 4th street.”
“Those bastards,” Charlie said and used his good arm to slam a fist on our desk. “I can swallow shooting a man in cold blood, I can even tolerate taking a bullet from a man who killed for a couple of trains on the East side of town. But when that man tarnishes our reputation, which is barely a reputation to begin with, with false acclaims in a bogus newspaper, that’s where I draw the line.”
After Charlie said this, when the hard look on his face melted to a smirk, I nodded. Not because I agreed with him, but because I liked that he was there. Despite the fact that he was fool-headed enough to get shot, I was glad that he was my partner. And I wished that he’d been on the rooftop with me.
“Why Gorbateski?” I’d said, but the villain had kept his composure. His face straight as an arrow, though his palms had sweat on them.
“Yeah,” the man said with a voice that dripped with malice. “Why would anyone have a hit put out on the biggest piece of scum in the city.”
“You’re no hit man,” I’d said. I told Charlie that the man laughed at me then. The man laughed a wheezy laugh that made me itch. Charlie smiled again, sympathetic this time. He knew how this all ended, and he knew how tempted I’d been to end it right then when the laugh came at me. And in Charlie’s eyes I saw what I’d felt only moments before. Charlie was happy I’d become his partner.
“You’re right,” the villain had said and pulled off his hat to run his knobby hand through his nasty hair. “I’m not exactly the hit man type. But I can point a gun, and pull the trigger, too. That’s not a skill too many people have these days. Anyone can point a gun. It takes gut to use it, though. And you know what else? I come cheap. Because I like pulling the trigger.”
At that’s when it had happened. I told Charlie about the crunching sound, like a dog that’d finally gotten a bite through a nice chunk of bone. The villain fell sideways to the gravel. I watched as the brick that had struck the man in the head landed on his chest then slid off of him. The dust he’d raised cleared in the breeze, but the blood pooled.
“What the hell did you do?” I’d shouted and turned to find Scoop near the stairs with a pale face.
Scoop straightened himself and stammered before finding words. Before he spoke, I saw something in the way he stood, something in the way he held himself after throwing the brick that would end our villain’s speech. I saw hope. He didn’t look mean or scared. Scoop looked sure of himself, sure, but he looked like he did what he thought was right.
When we’d gotten back to the office, Charlie had asked me why I gave Scoop our card and told him to call when something came up. He didn’t like the idea of me enforcing a kid. When Charlie had asked me that then, I didn’t have an answer. As I told him my story, and he sat across from me at the desk after all this was done and I looked back at how it all ended, I knew I’d found my answer.
“If we don’t ask him for help,” I said to Charlie. “If we don’t give him something to do, someone else might. And in a city like this, where guys get shot for just reaching out at an opportunity, where whole families crumble beneath angry boots, it may be good for the kid to see that guys like us are still out there. We may not be perfect, and we may survive just by getting lucky, but if I told that kid to scram and find his own way in the world, I can’t help but think it might be his body we’re tracking the killer of next time.”
I chewed on the filter of the cigarette. It’d gone out sometime during my story.
On the roof, I’d stepped over to the man who lay bleeding. Up close, I could see the blood leaking from his temple, could smell it heating up in the sun, could almost taste it. I’d toed the man’s arm. It’d moved with no resistance. Against the small of his back, I’d found another gun. Smaller than the other, but just as deadly.
“I saw him reaching,” Scoop had told me then. “He was drawing you in, not the other way around. He was going to shoot you.”
I’d stood, more to get away form the dying man that anything else. The small pistol rested heavily in my palm.
“He never would have given away his employer,” I said to Charlie. “Scoop saved my life on the rooftop. Save us all. We owe him.”
Charlie leaned back in the chair and it groaned with him. On the desk two mugs filled with cold coffee sat, ignored since I’d poured them. I waited for Charlie to speak, and as I did I lifted the mug closest to me and sipped at it.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Charlie said.
“What’s that?”
“We heard Scoop stomping around like an elephant when we went into that house,” he said. “That’s how we found him and all. But then he sneaks up to the guy on the roof, close enough to lob a brick at his head, and you two don’t hear him coming.”
“Yeah,” I said. “How about that.”
Holding the universe together 