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  I dusted off my hat and looked back at Huey.

  The right side of Huey’s head was gone.

  He staggered, unsure of what had happened, but only his left eye and the nose remained—the other upper half was splattered on the bistro’s windows.

  How he was able to move or think with a big chunk of his brain gone is anybody’s guess, but he was still standing exhaling smoke. Huey lifted his right hand and pawed that side of his head.

  Some people approaching him on the sidewalk did a triple take, and I saw one of them try to say something to him, something stupid like “Are you alright?”

  Huey’s left eye actually looked at the guy. Then the eye looked worried.

  This stranger actually took off his jacket and went to hold it against Huey’s head, to stop the bleeding or hold the remaining brains in place. Nice guy. I’m not sure I would have done that for a stranger, much less that rat Huey, much less for a guy who was obviously a goner. Huey pulled away from the Samaritan and tried to go back into the bistro, but his hands were unable to grasp the door handle. He lost his balance and stumbled, and the Samaritan tried to break his fall.

  It was then that my latest murder-induced fog lifted and I noticed something screwy. I mean screwier than seeing my second sniper victim in two days. I noted that the blood was sprayed on the glass bistro windows directly behind where Huey had been standing.

  I realized this meant the shot came from street level, from across the street, from someone on the sidewalk or in a car or in a shop within eyeshot.

  Give me a golf clap for this amazing insight. What I really should have been thinking was about that angry bumblebee. Was another bullet coming for me?

  Pedestrians had stopped in their tracks trying to see what had happened and make sense of it.

  That’s what made the shooter stand out.

  He was making tracks while everybody else was standing still, gawking. Then he looked right at me as he was turning the corner onto Sackett Street.

  He was tall, young, and pale, with full lips and big rosy cheeks. Or I guess his face was just flushed with emotion. His hair was light brown and cut short so it stuck out like long fuzz on his head. He was in a dark sweatshirt and sweat pants and white tennis shoes. Looked like he’d just come from the gym. Except there was a trench coat over his right arm and hand. Anyway, he looked like a kid, not at all what I expected of a sniper.

  When we made eye contact, we both knew he’d been made.

  I realized this was the rosy-cheeked kid I’d seen outside the scrap yard the night before.

  I crossed the street toward him, walking fast. I didn’t want to run until the kid did, but he was out of sight. My hands were flexing, jonesing to smash that punk face in and roll him up into a ball with his trench coat and kick him down the street to the precinct.

  I turned the corner and looked down Sackett toward Hoyt Street. No punk.

  Hoyt Street paralleled Smith Street the way Court did but on the other side and with an inverse property value. Beyond Hoyt was Bond Street and then the Gowanus Canal. The farther down that way you went the more industrial it got, but with little pockets of residential, and maybe the stray struggling art gallery. One day it might be nice down in Gowanus. The speculators were counting on it. It hadn’t happened yet.

  Sackett Street in this block was lined with sycamores and brownstone building stoops, probably thirty or forty on each side of the street. The punk couldn’t have made it all the way to Hoyt Street in the short time he’d been out of eyeshot. He would be hiding behind one of the stoops, or in a doorway.

  I scrunched the hat back on my head until it came down to my ears, scanning the stoops. Behind me, I heard a police car bloop its siren, a local patrol car dropping in to see what all the fuss was about at the bistro. The cops would be no help to me. If I tried getting a couple patrolmen to help me search for the kid, I would only spend a half hour convincing them I knew what I was talking about. Besides, I couldn’t take my eyes off the stoops for a second, and I couldn’t walk down Sackett toward Hoyt without risking an ambush—and I had to guess he still had that gun.

  So I waited, listening to my breath coming fast and hard. I hadn’t even begun to chase the punk, but my body was getting ready for some serious exercise. If he made like a jackrabbit I would, too. I’m an older rabbit, though. He could probably distance me. Plus he had tennis shoes. I wasn’t exactly in cowboy boots, but my leather street shoes weren’t exactly track shoes.

  Thirty seconds passed. It was long enough that I heard an ambulance wail in the distance, and the crowds behind me thickened with people murmuring about what had happened.

  His head was gone.

  Gone?

  Part of his head just exploded.

  Exploded?

  Who was it?

  Anybody we know?

  At the bistro?

  Was he shot?

  The white-haired guy.

  He smoked. A lot.

  Then down Sackett I heard some commotion. I began to walk toward it.

  On my right, ahead, a woman was shouting.

  The kid came stumbling out from behind a stoop, chased by an old woman with bright orange hair and a broom. He’d been hiding in her doorway, and she was chasing him out. She took a swing at him with the broom and hit the trench coat that was still over his arm.

  An ugly black gun fell from under the trench coat and clattered onto the sidewalk. It wasn’t a pistol, but it wasn’t a rifle, either, something in between. It looked like it might be a folding gun of some kind. What I know about guns could fill a fortune cookie. The short barrel seemed really thick.

  The punk’s eyes met mine.

  I was about fifty feet away.

  His hand reached for the gun, and all the scared drained out of his pupils. The rosy cheeks were gone. His face was ashen, serious. Deadly.

  It was at that moment I remembered about the angry bee that had missed me the day before.

  I’m going to take a second here to do my tantric exercise because just telling this part brings back the anxiety of that moment.

  Breathe slowly in through the nose; close the eyes.

  Breathe slowly out through the lips; stroke back my hair.

  Breathe slowly in through the nose; open the eyes.

  Breathe slowly out through the lips.

  Crouched over, he lifted the gun in both hands and pointed the fat barrel at me.

  I stopped walking. There had been no time to dodge this way or that, hide, nothing. I was too far away to charge him. I was basically screwed.

  The old lady was still barking at him—she must not have seen the gun. She didn’t seem to because she hauled off and clobberedthe punk in the face with the broom.

  An angry bee went over my head, and then I heard the chop of the gun going off. I say chop because it was the sound of the butcher knife through the pineapple. The gun had some kind of silencer on it.

  The kid fell back onto his butt, dropping the gun again. That’s when the old woman saw the weapon. She shrieked and vanished back into her brownstone like a witch back into her cave.

  I charged.

  The kid grabbed for the gun.

  I was thirty feet from him.

  His hand lifted the gun by the fat barrel.

  Twenty feet.

  He spun the gun and cocked it.

  Ten feet.

  He pointed the gun.

  I kicked it out of his hands and jumped over him. At top speed, there was no stopping unless I tried to plow into him on the sidewalk and come face-to-face with the gun. If he’d rolled away I’d have smashed into the sidewalk.

  The gun clattered into the roadway between two parked cars and vanished under one of them. I pivoted, and the kid lunged for the gun.

  I got to him before he could dive under the car. Instead the punk rolled away and onto his feet. He lit out toward Hoyt, full tilt down the center of the street.

  I crammed my new hat down on my head and went after him.

>   You know how I said I won’t be anybody’s whipping boy? Well, I don’t like being shot at, either. It makes me really anxious, and then I want to act out. Act out like by twisting the shooter’s head off and stomping on it.

  The kid cut right on Hoyt’s sidewalk. I was thirty feet back, my overcoat flapping behind me.

  He zigged across the street; I zigged across the street.

  I followed him as he went left on Union Street, down a long slope, and then right on Bond Street. Parking and boarded-up factories were on the left, crappy residential buildings on the right.

  We passed Bridget’s green loft building. Huey wouldn’t be using any more sheets there, poor son of a bitch. I flashed on the image of him standing in front of the blood-splattered bistro not knowing part of his head was missing. That’s too pathetic for words. Even if he was ripping me off, or trying to, I don’t wish that indignity on anybody. Huey was a crook, and by double-crossing me he was only doing what crooks do, and you’ll note that I never said anything real mean about him even though he was screwing me over. That’s bad energy.

  It was the punk forty feet ahead that did that to poor Huey.

  I ran harder, puffing pretty good, my leather shoes slamming the pavement. Like I said, I was prepared to act out, so I had adrenaline working for me, and probably some endorphins, too. It helped that the kid wasn’t as fast as I thought he would be for his age. I wondered if maybe he wasn’t as young as I had thought he was. Or maybe he just wasn’t athletic.

  When the punk heard my footsteps come closer, he sped up, pulling away as he rounded the corner left onto Carroll Street, toward the bridge over the Gowanus Canal.

  I think I mentioned somewhere that I’d been in that neighborhood for twenty years or more. In all that time, I’d never seen one of the little iron and wood drawbridges across the canal open.

  Until then.

  You can hardly believe these drawbridges still work, they’re so old. The striped wooden gates to close the road had to be put in place by hand, and the bridge itself slid to the side, on rails like a train, pulled by cables. I kid you not, they almost have to be cranked by hand. There was a yellow Department of Transportation van parked at the other side of the bridge, with one DOT guy on each side, manning the striped gates.

  I saw the kid veer away from the DOT guy on this side, who shouted something.

  There was nowhere for the kid to go. The right and left sides of the street were sheet metal fences, and there was no climbing them.

  An oil barge was where the bridge would have been, moving slowly, and I saw the kid speed up, even though the DOT guy was waving his arms and shouting at him.

  Pretty obvious what the kid had in mind: a jump to the barge, and then maybe make it to the far side. The barge was about thirty feet wide, the canal maybe a hundred. The boat was closer to the near side.

  Let me mention that the Gowanus Canal, though much better than it used to be, is still a nasty waterway. Sure, ten years before it had giant algae blooms and you couldn’t even see the bottom. You could practically walk across it. Since a cleanup effort, people had seen a fish or two, and you’d see the hipsters with silly grins paddling kayaks in there, maybe imagining they were in some pristine river in the Rockies. The fact of the matter? The Gowanus Canal was not pristine. It usually smelled bad. Any time we had a serious rain, the sewers overflowed into the canal. That’s when you learned how popular condoms are as birth control—and these condoms floated on the surface, in the slick of oil from leaky underground heating fuel tanks in the area.

  I’m just saying, but the Gowanus Canal is unpristine.

  So I’m hot on the punk’s tail, hoping more or less he ends up in the water, because I’d always wanted to see some deserving scumbag fall in there. The punk fit the bill.

  He ran around the end of the striped gate, upsetting the DOT man even more. At the edge of the bridge he took a flying leap for the barge, arms waving in the air.

  I felt cheated.

  He landed on his side on the barge’s deck. There isn’t any crew on these barges—they’re pushed by tugs from behind.

  I approached the edge.

  You don’t think for a second I’d risk falling in that water, after I just described how unpristine it was? I stopped, and watched as the kid got to his feet. Looked like he’d hurt his shoulder, as he had trouble getting up and staggering to the far edge of the barge.

  Now what, I wondered. He still had fifty feet of unpristine canal between him and the far shore. I could see him trying to decide what to do. Jump in, swim for it?

  The DOT guy was suddenly in my face.

  He says to me, “Hey, prick, whaddaya think you’re doing, huhn?”

  I was in no mood for this. Of course, if I let every dickhead like that make me act out I’d’ve been in prison a long time ago.

  At the same time, it’s not good to bottle up your emotions. So I snarled.

  It’s hard to describe my snarl except to say that when I do it, I feel ten feet tall and ten feet wide and ready to flip cars and breathe fire. Based on people’s reaction I’d say I must look the way I feel.

  So I snarled, and the DOT guy went white and scampered off down the block.

  I turned back to the kid.

  He was still standing on the edge of the barge. The gap to his escape was getting wider as the tug steered the barge clear of the bridge and toward the pilings to dock.

  I saw the punk consider getting off at the bulkhead on my side of the canal, but he looked back at me and decided against it.

  He hopped off the far side of the barge into the canal, feet first.

  I tried not to gag.

  I couldn’t see him again until he had splashed almost to the far-side bulkhead, where he grabbed onto some orange construction fencing that dangled into the water. There was a telephone company yard there, and the fence was being replaced. The orange plastic fence covered a gap between the new and old fence. He began to try to climb out. It was either climb out there or he’d have to swim a good distance up or down the canal to find another place out.

  The telephone company maintenance yard had an entrance next to the Union Street bridge over the canal, two blocks north.

  I began running to Union Street, but much of my wind had left me. Stopping like that had got me out of the flow, and made my muscles harden up. I reached the telephone truck yard entrance a couple minutes later.

  There was a security shack at the telephone yard entrance at the corner of Nevins Street, and I jogged past it into the lot.

  Someone with an accent shouted “Hey!” behind me, but I ignored it, making for the line of white telephone trucks at the bulkhead.

  I found wet footprints at the bulkhead and followed them across the blacktop until they petered out at a back entrance to the maintenance building. A middle-aged Polish rent-a-cop stepped into my path. He couldn’t have looked more scared if he had stood in the path of a rampaging grizzly bear. I guess I must have looked pretty ferocious, what with all the sweat and that hat pulled down to my ears, huffing and puffing. He was shaking, but he was determined to do what he was paid to do.

  How did I know he was Polish? They mostly have these bushy mustaches that come all the way down to their chins. Mostly just the men.

  I kid.

  He says, “I need see eye-dee badge!” He seemed to be waiting for me to kill him.

  You’re expecting me to roar at the guy, right? For whatever reason I felt sorry for this guy, because this was probably the only time in his career as a rent-a-cop that he ever had to confront anybody, and it turned out to be a giant sweaty man in an overcoat, a stupid sweater, and a fedora squeezed on my head like a bottle cap.

  “You see a guy climb out of the water?”

  “Oh yes. No eye-dee. He go. Now you no eye-dee, you must go. What a day.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “To bus.”

  “What bus?”

  “He ask bus, I send to Third Avenue. What a day!”
r />   I patted him on the shoulder, and he practically jumped out of his skin. “Thanks.”

  I went back out to Union Street and jogged to Third Avenue. This is where the neighborhood starts to get more residential again, and where until recently the biggest employer was the South Brooklyn Casket Company. That’s right. Coffins.

  At the corner, I could see the bus in the distance, down around Second Street. I’d never catch the bus four blocks down.

  At the same time, and even taking into account that I was winded, sagging, and soggy from sweat, it seemed a shame to lose the punk when I still had him in my sights.

  I waved a twenty-dollar bill at passing town cars. If you wave cash they know you’re not with the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and you can hail one faster. If you were a TLC agent, getting them to stop by waving cash would be entrapment. That’s what they tell me.

  The second town car stopped, and I got in. The bus was pretty far gone, but we caught up to it just after Ninth Street, and I had the driver zoom around it and drop me one stop ahead of the bus.

  I hailed the bus and got on. I fished out my fare card and paid.

  The kid wasn’t on the bus. So I went back to the driver, an older black guy with baggy eyes that told me he had seen it all several times over.

  “A kid get on the bus around Union Street? He was all wet, soaking wet.”

  “Smelled bad, too. You a cop?”

  “Something like that.”

  He snorted like he’d heard that response a thousand times since noon. “I kicked him out around Seventh Street. Had no fare.”

  While I was in the town car I had been so fixated on the bus that we may have driven right past the murdering punk and I didn’t catch a glimpse of him. That sucked.

  “I see. Thanks. You can let me out next stop.”

  “Of course.”

  I hailed another town car and asked him to take me home by way of Bond Street. I had a feeling Smith Street would be taped off by the police as they tried to figure out what happened to Huey’s head and what happened to the guy in the fedora who chased a kid who dropped a gun on Sackett Street.

  No way did I want the cops snooping into my business with Huey.