Rough Trade

with Bennato’s gun trained on me I made my way into the house as slowly as I could. The farther I got from Chrissy the more helpless I felt. Even though I was face to face with an armed man who had already killed twice, so far my fear was all for Chrissy.
    Once I got to the middle of the kitchen, Bennato motioned for me to stop. I looked around the room and tried to assess my options. I was quite a distance from the stairs, the door, or the garage. Coach Bennato stood between me and the door into the rest of the house. The telephone was at his back.
    “All the loose ends tied up except for you,” he informed me with an elaborate sigh.
    “Don’t even think about it,” I said. “Right now the evidence tells your story. It’s doubtful they’d even have enough to arrest you, and if they did, with a good lawyer you’ll walk,” I assured him, trying to sound lawyerlike and reasonable.
    “Oh, I think it’ll tell the story I want even after I shoot you,” he replied.
    Normally threats like that are easy to speak, harder to honor. But Coach Bennato had already proved himself a killer. I had called it right. I was just another loose end that needed cleaning up.
    My breath started coming in shallow, rapid little gasps that didn’t seem to be doing a particularly good job of getting oxygen to my brain. My thoughts ran wildly from one subject to another. I found myself wondering whether it would hurt when the bullets hit me, whether Chrissy had inhaled enough carbon monoxide to cause brain damage, how long it would take her to develop hypothermia lying in her underwear on the driveway, and how many bullets were in the efficient-looking automatic whose barrel I was staring down.
    I watched with a sense of horrible fascination as Coach Bennato’s thumb traveled and came to rest on the hammer of the gun. It was a small gesture, less than a quarter of an inch. But if it’s true that all acts of violence are committed twice-—once in intent and the second time in action—I knew that I had just come a great deal closer to dying.
    And then everything seemed to slow down. For the first time I knew that I was experiencing real fear. Not the fear of high places or the fear that comes with being alone in the dark. The kind of fear that is born from a thousand years of inbred instinct. The kind of fear that tells you what to do if you want to stay alive. Real fear will sometimes tell you to play dead or to stop breathing, tell you whether to run or stay and fight. What it told me was that there was no way out of that kitchen that didn’t involve getting shot. For some reason I accepted this dispassionately—a fact.
    I remembered my roommate’s countless stories of patients who’d come into her emergency room shot five or six times. The important thing, I told myself, was to be sure to keep Bennato sufficiently off balance to prevent him from controlling where he hit me. I remember thinking that even if I could not take his gun away, I could take away his choice of how and when to use it.
    I don’t remember making the decision to charge. I’m sure it wasn’t made consciously. I don’t even remember being shot. All I remember is tackling Bennato around the ankles, his body falling on top of mine, and the two of us rolling around on the floor, scrabbling after the gun.
    Somehow I managed to get on top of him and get my hands around his throat. It was then that I realized my entire left side was slick with blood and I was having a hard time making my hand work. I kept on telling it to squeeze, but it wasn’t doing any good.
    “Hey!” said Jake Palmer, walking in through the garage, carrying Chrissy, still unconscious, over his shoulder like a spoil of war. “What the hell is going on here?”
    “Help... me,” I managed to gasp.
    “What the fuck,” was all he said before he stepped up neatly and kicked Coach Bennato in the head. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, pulled the antenna out with his teeth, and began to dial. “What are you doing here?” I gasped, slipping too rapidly into shock to seem appropriately grateful.
    “When Gorman called me back, I tried you at the number out here, but nobody answered so I figured I might as well take a ride, you know. I mean, hey, I heard you say that it was a matter of life or death that you talk to this guy, but I never figured you meant it literally.”
     

CHAPTER 28
     
     
    Football season was finally over. The Monarchs had finished out the year in the