Read Tool of the Trade for Free Online Page B

hadhappened: The rear derailleur had slipped off its mount and gotten wedged in between the spokes and the frame. The bike was going no farther that night. I locked it to the nearest parking meter and started walking home. (The nearest T stop was almost as far away as my flat off Central Square.) I followed the advice of all the newspaper articles and walked briskly, looking straight ahead, right hand in my jacket pocket. Wrapped around the deadly granola bar I’d forgotten was there.
    He wasn’t dressed like a hood and he wasn’t black, and his eyes didn’t burn with junkie fire. He was probably working his way through college.
    He stepped out of a doorway and presented an effective argument: a long-barreled.44 Magnum revolver
à la
the Clint Eastwood folk hero. “Give me your wallet,” he said, an unnecessary refinement.
    I had my hands in the air and was about to tell him that the wallet was in my inside coat pocket—obviously, I didn’t want to reach for it—when he said, “The watch, too.”
    I reached for the watch and pushed the button. I took a step toward him.
    “Stay there.” He hauled back on the hammer, cocking it with two clicks: soft, loud. “I’m not fucking around.”
    “Take the pistol,” I said, “put the muzzle in your mouth, and pull the trigger.”
    He shook his head slowly and whispered, “No.” Then he put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
    The report was so loud it stung my face like a slap. The bullet shattered the glass transom of the shoe store behind him, setting off the burglar alarm, and spraying the entrance alcove with blood and brainsand chips of bone. The pistol clattered to the sidewalk, and he took one lurching step toward me, curious slack expression on his face, and then folded up like an abandoned marionette. His legs twitched as if he were trying, to run away. Blood geysered from an artery embedded in the fist-sized exit wound. I watched the fountain slow to a trickle. Smiling.
    After forty years I had returned to the territory of my childhood. But this time the one suddenly beyond help, suddenly meat, was not a friend or relative or fellow traveler—but someone who deserved it. Who had asked for it and got it. I recognized the grisly elated feeling, a very specific memory: In the spring, after the siege had lifted, we were playing in the forest outside of the city and came upon the dry old corpse of a Nazi soldier. My older friend, Yuri, had a camp ax, actually a small, blunt hatchet, and we took turns hacking away at the weathered remains. Laughing like a family of hyena cubs. Finally rolling around in the mud helpless with gleeful horror. Over the next few months we combed the woods carefully, repeating the experience many times. The Nazis had left in a hurry, no time to bury all their dead.
    A police car screeched to a stop at the curb. I didn’t turn around, but could see the drama reflected in the glass of the shoe store’s display window. The driver piled out of the car and took refuge behind its hood, his pistol in a two-handed grip aligned steadily on me. I thought it prudent to raise my hands. The other officer swarmed out of the passenger seat into a rather vulnerable kneeling position, with a riot gun aimed at the small of my back. They were shouting simultaneously, very hard to understand with the siren going
wow-wow-wow
, but the gist of it was clear. I was not to move or try anything funny. I was to keep myhands, my fucking hands, in the air and turn to face them, slowly. I obeyed.
    The driver rushed around the car’s hood and put the muzzle of his gun under my chin while he patted me in the obvious places. The other one played a flashlight beam on the remains of the mugger and then bolted for the curb and vomited.
    The driver walked me roughly toward the corpse and pinned me up against the glass. I could hear his sharp gasp as he surveyed the damage.
    “What the
fuck
. Point-blank in the mouth. Drug deal?”
    “No, it was suicide.”