He was going to shoot me anyway. I could see it in the lines of him.
I said, “Footage. You’re right outside a bar. You’re giving Oakleigh footage of yourself, shooting her lawyer.”
It was so hard to look away from the gun’s black eye. But I made myself. I made my eyes cut away over his shoulder, to the kinder gaze of the tiny security camera stationed over the door into McGwiggen’s.
He glanced back, reflexively, a half turn of his head to look where I was looking. As he moved, I moved with him, ducking down and stepping forward. I felt so slow, like I was trying to sink into concrete, trying to get under the gun’s trajectory.
His hand jerked, and I heard a huge roar, so close it deafened me. I was dazzled with the muzzle flash. I didn’t know if I was hit. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t even know if I was living, until I felt the bone-deep jarring when I slammed my heel into his instep.
He screamed, and I heard the champagne pop of a second shot, muffled by the endless echo of the first shot in my ears. Already my knee was coming up. Already my hands were reaching for his eyes.
I heard the clatter of the gun falling away, and then his hands were scrabbling at my throat, grasping for purchase, and we were animals. Animals each trying to be the living one when it was over. My knee connected hard with his balls, and he bent to it. My nails dug into the meat of his pale face. Someone was bellowing, a tearing scream of sound, and I could feel the way the noise ripped at my throat from the inside, so it was me.
His grip released, his body choosing flight for him, his nature rising as surely as mine had. I could feel wetness and skin jammed in my nail beds, and I dug and ripped. He shoved me, his fists double hammers that banged into my chest. I felt my hands tear from his face. I was thrown backward, airborne, into the trash cans. I slammed into them and two of them tipped over and spilled in a great clatter of metal. I fell between them.
I heard my voice still blaring, and when I got my head up, he was scrambling away in a slow staggering run, crouched over his balls. I kept screaming, a banshee’s wail, a howling. I didn’t see how the people inside hadn’t heard me. I should be bouncing back off satellites in space.
Even as I thought it, the smoked glass door burst open, and it was Wes, with his eyes bugging in his broad, young face. Grace was right behind him, too, another bartender. She was a tough girl with almost as much ink as she had skin space. I had to make the unearthly sound coming out of me stop, on purpose, like I was turning off a bad song on the radio. Wes stared wildly around, then took off down the alley after Clark. Clark saw him coming and sped up, still hunched over his balls, running away.
I sprawled between the overturned cans, and my feet were bare. He’d thrown me right out of my shoes. My hands started running up and down my body of their own volition, trying to find out if I had holes in me. I touched my face, my hair, my neck, my chest. Down the alley, I heard a clatter and another scream. Wes had tackled Clark.
My throat hurt inside from the rasping yell, and my chest hurt where his fists had hit me. My whole body hurt where I had smashed into the cans and then the ground. I sat up anyway. The gun was lying near me, shiny as a toy. I saw my shoes there, too, one on its side, one upright. Grace was kneeling by me now, though I hadn’t seen her move.
She said, “Oh my God, Paula, we saw you on the feed. Billy called the cops.” Billy was the bar back.
“Am I bleeding?” I croaked at Grace. “Do I look shot or bleeding?”
“No,” she said. “No, but God, your hair is so fucked up.”
I was in shock, I realized then, because I started laughing.
Grace said, “Who is that? Are you dating him?”
I shook my head, and the world swung all around me. “That was the thousand and first guy.”
Down the alley I could hear Wes yelling, “Stay down, asshole!”
Grace helped me up, and we peered down into the dim light. Wes was sitting on Clark’s back, grinding his bleeding face into the pavement. Clark flopped like an angry flounder under Wes’s bulk. Standing deepened the throb in my left hip, but the pain seemed distant and unimportant. An interesting fact that I was noting. Inside me, my blood rushed in circles, every vein part of a racetrack, all my red cells jostling to be first and fastest.
“Are you okay?” Grace asked.
I was better than okay. There were no holes in my good body. I had won. I had seen him running. I was seeing him held down now, right now, the blood in streaks of red all down his face, and oh ye gods and little fishes, it was good.
Billy came out the glass door then, eyes wide, mouth panting. He took in the scene, then ran to help Wes.