Then the coed finally clears Lisey's field of vision, and as Dashmiel and her husband come into full view again, Lisey sees the English teacher's head snap up and his body go on red alert. It happens in an instant. Lisey sees what Dashmiel sees. She sees Blondie with the gun (it will prove to be a Ladysmith .22 made in Korea and bought at a garage sale in South Nashville for thirtyseven dollars) pointed at her husband, who has at last seen the danger and stopped. In Lisey-time, all this happens very, very slowly. She does not actually see the bullet fly out of the .22's muzzle - not quite - but she hears Scott say, very mildly, seeming to drawl the words over the course of ten or even fifteen seconds: "Let's talk about it, son, right?" And then she sees fire bloom from the gun's nickel-plated muzzle in an uneven yellow-white corsage. She hears a pop - stupid, insignificant, the sound of someone breaking a paper lunchsack with the palm of his hand. She sees Dashmiel, that southern-fried chickenshit, go jackrabbitting off to his immediate left. She sees Scott buck backward on his heels. At the same time his chin thrusts forward. The combination is weird and graceful, like a dancefloor move. A black hole blinks open on the right side of his summer sportcoat. "Son, you honest-to-God don't want to do that," he says in his drawling Lisey-time voice, and even in Lisey-time she can hear how his voice grows thinner on every word until he sounds like a test pilot in a high-altitude chamber. Yet Lisey thinks he still doesn't know he's been shot. She's almost positive. His sportcoat swings open like a gate as he puts his hand out in a commanding stop-this gesture, and she realizes two things simultaneously. The first is that the shirt inside his coat is turning red. The second is that she has at last broken into some semblance of a run.
"I got to end all this ding-dong," says Gerd Allen Cole with perfect fretful clarity. "I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias." And Lisey is suddenly sure that once Scott is dead, once the damage is done, Blondie will either kill himself or pretend to try. For the time being, however, he has this business to finish. The business of the writer. Blondie turns his wrist slightly so that the smoking barrel of the Ladysmith .22 points at the left side of Scott's chest; in Lisey-time the move is smooth and slow. He has done the lung; now he'll do the heart. Lisey knows she can't allow that to happen. If her husband is to have any chance at all, this lethal goofball mustn't be allowed to put any more lead into him.
As if repudiating her, Gerd Allen Cole says, "It never ends until you go down. You're responsible for all these repetitions, old boy. You are hell, you are a monkey, and now you are my monkey!"
This speech is the closest he comes to making sense, and making it gives Lisey just enough time to first wind up with the silver spade - the body knows its business and her hands have already found their position near the top of the thing's forty-inch handle - and then swing it. Still, it's close. If it had been a horse race, the tote-board would undoubtedly have flashed the HOLD TICKETS WAIT FOR PHOTO message. But when the race is between a man with a gun and a woman with a shovel, you don't need a photo. In slowed-down Liseytime she sees the silver scoop strike the gun, driving it upward just as that corsage of fire blooms again (she can see only part of it this time, and the muzzle is completely hidden by the blade of the spade). She sees the businessend of the ceremonial shovel carry on forward and upward as the second shot goes harmlessly into the hot August sky. She sees the gun fly loose, and there's time to think Holy smuck! I really put a charge into this one! before the spade connects with Blondie's face. His hand is still in there (three of those long slim fingers will be broken), but the spade's silver bowl connects solidly just the same, breaking Cole's nose, shattering his right cheekbone and the bony orbit around his staring right eye, shattering nine teeth as well. A Mafia goon with a set of brass knuckles couldn't have done better.
And now - still slow, still in Lisey-time - the elements of Stefan Queensland's award-winning photograph are assembling themselves.
Captain S. Heffernan has seen what's happening only a second or two after Lisey, but he also has to deal with the bystander problem - in his case a fat bepimpled fella wearing baggy Bermuda shorts and a tee-shirt with Scott Landon's smiling face on it. Captain Heffernan shunts this young fella aside with one muscular shoulder.
By then Blondie is sinking to the ground (and out of the forthcoming photo's field) with a dazed expression in one eye and blood pouring from the other. Blood is also gushing from the hole which at some future date may again serve as his mouth. Heffernan completely misses the actual hit.