Again Boris moaned, as the guy yanked his hair once more, and from across the car threw me an unmistakeable look—which I understood just as plainly as if he’d spoken the words aloud, an urgent and very specific cut of the eyes straight from our shoplifting days: run for it, Potter, go.
“Boris,” I said, after a disbelieving pause, “please, just give it to them,” but Boris only moaned again, despairingly, as Frits jammed the gun hard under his chin and Martin stepped forward to take the painting from him.
“Excellent. Thanks for that,” he said bemusedly, tucking his gun under his arm and beginning to pluck and fumble with the string, which Boris had tied in an obstinate little knot. “Cool.” His fingers weren’t working very well, and up close, when he’d reached to take the painting, I’d seen why: he was high as a kite. “Anyway—” Martin glanced behind him, as if wanting to include absent friends on the joke, then back with another bemused shrug—“sorry. Take them over there, Frits,” he said, still busy with the painting, nodding at a shadowy, dungeon-like corner of the garage, darker than the rest, and when Frits turned partly from Boris to gesture at me with the gun—come on, come on, you too—I realized, cold with horror, what Boris had known was going to happen from the moment he saw them: why he’d wanted me to run for it, or at least to try.
But in the half-moment as Frits was motioning to me with the gun, we’d all lost track of Boris, whose cigarette flew out in a shower of sparks. Frits screamed and slapped his cheek, then stumbled back grappling at his collar where it had lodged against his neck. In the same instant Martin—distracted with the painting, directly across from me—looked up, and I was still looking at him blankly across the roof of the car when I heard it, to my right, three fast cracks which made us both turn quickly to the side. With the fourth (flinching, eyes closed) a warm spray of blood thumped across the car roof and struck me in the face and when I opened my eyes again the Asian kid was stepping back horrified and drawing a hand down his front in a bloody smear like a butcher’s apron and I was staring at a lighted sign Beetaalautomaat op where Boris’s head had been; blood was pouring from under the car and Boris was on the ground on his elbows, feet going, he was trying to scramble up from the floor, I couldn’t tell if he was hurt or not and I must have run around to him without thinking because the next thing I knew I was on the other side of the car and trying to help him up, blood everywhere, Frits was a mess, slumped against the car with a baseball-sized hole in the side of his head, and I’d just noticed Frits’s gun lying on the ground when I heard Boris exclaim sharply and there was Martin, tight-eyed with blood on his sleeve, hand clamped to his arm and fumbling to bring up his gun
It had happened before it even happened, like a skip in a DVD throwing me forward in time, because I have no memory at all of picking the pistol off the floor, only of a kick so hard it threw my arm in the air, I didn’t really hear the bang until I felt the kick and the casing flew back and hit me in the face and I shot again, eyes half-closed against the noise and my arm jolting with every shot, the trigger had a resistance to it, a stiffness, like pulling some too-heavy door latch, car windows popping and Martin with an arm coming up, exploding safety glass and chunks of concrete flying out a pillar and I’d got Martin in the shoulder, the soft gray cloth was drenched and dark, a spreading dark stain, cordite smell and deafening echo that drove me so deep inside my skull that it was less like actual sound striking my eardrums than a wall slamming down hard in my mind and driving me back into some hard internal blackness from childhood, and Martin’s viper eyes met mine and he was slumped forward with the gun propped on the roof of the car when I shot again and hit him above the eye, red burst that made me flinch and then, somewhere behind me, I heard the sound of running feet slapping on concrete—the boy, white coat running to the exit ramp with the painting under his arm, he was running up the ramp to the street, echoes reverberating in the tiled space and I almost shot at him only somehow it was a completely different moment and I was facing away from the car, I was doubled over with my hands on my knees and the gun was on the ground, I had no memory of dropping it although the sound was there, it was clattering to the floor and it kept on clattering and I was still hearing the echoes and feeling the vibration of the gun up my arm, retching and doubled over, with Frits’s blood crawling and curling on my tongue.
Out of the darkness the sound of feet running, and again I could not see, or move, everything black at the edges and I was falling even though I wasn’t because somehow I was sitting on a low stretch of tiled wall with my head between my knees looking down at clear red spit, or vomit, on the shiny, epoxy-painted concrete between my shoes and Boris, there was Boris, winded and breathless and bloody, running back in, his voice was coming from a million miles off, Potter, are you all right? he’s gone, I couldn’t catch him, he got away