A Ticket to the Boneyard by Lawrence Block

the jury know about it?” I shrugged. “Connie could testify,” I said. “He hurt her and he threatened you. But would she stand up?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I don’t think she would.”
    “Probably not.”
    “I want to see something,” I said, and I bent over Motley. He was still out cold. Maybe he had a glass jaw. There was a fighter like that, Bob Satterfield. He could take a punch with the best of them, but if you got his jaw just right he’d flop on his face for a ten count, so out of it he’d sleep through a Chinese fire drill.
    I fumbled in his jacket pocket, straightened up, turned to show Elaine what I was holding. “This is a help,” I said. “A baby automatic, looks like .25 caliber. It’s sure to be unregistered, and there’s no way in the world he’d have a carry permit. That’s criminal possession of a deadly weapon in the second degree, that’s a Class-C felony.”
    “Is that good?”
    “It doesn’t hurt. The thing is, I want to make sure his bail is too high for him to make, and I want him charged with something serious enough so that his lawyer can’t plea-bargain the case down to nothing. I want him to do real time. He’s a bad son of a bitch, he fucking well ought to go away.” I looked at her. “Would you stand up?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Would you testify?”
    “Of course.”
    “There’s more to it. Would you lie under oath?”
    “What do you want me to say?”
    I studied her for a moment. “I think you’ll stand up,” I said. “I’m going to take a chance.”
    “What do you mean?”
    I wiped the gun clean of prints with my pocket handkerchief. I got an arm between Motley’s shoulders and the wall and raised him up into a half-crouch. He was heavier than he looked, as thin as he was, and I could feel the hardness of his tissue. The muscles didn’t relax fully even when he was out cold.
    I fitted the gun into his right hand, got his index finger inside the trigger guard and curled it around the trigger. I found the safety, flicked it off. I wrapped my hand around his, levered his body a few degrees more erect, and saw where the gun was pointed. I was aiming right at one of the paintings, the one that later turned out to be worth fifty grand. I swung a little ways to the left and squeezed his finger against the trigger and put a hole in the wall. I placed the second shot a little higher, and angled the third almost into the ceiling. Then I let go of him and he fell back onto the floor and the wall, and the gun dropped from his hand to the floor beside him.
    I said, “He was holding a gun on me. I kicked the coffee table at him. It knocked him off balance but he did get off three shots while he was falling, and then I crashed into him and took him down and out.”
    She was nodding, her face a study in concentration. If the gunshots had startled her, she seemed to have recovered quickly. Of course the shots hadn’t been that loud, and the little bullets hadn’t done much damage, just making neat little holes in the plaster.
    “He fired a gun,” I said. “He tried to kill a cop. That’s not something he’ll walk away from.”
    “I’ll swear to it.”
    “I know you will,” I said. “I know you’ll stand up.” I went over to her and held her for a minute or two. Then I went into the bedroom and got the bourbon bottle. I had a short one before I picked up the phone and called it in, and I had the rest of it while we waited for the cops to get there.
     
Chapter 4
     
    She never did have to testify, not in court. She gave a sworn statement, perjuring herself cheerfully on paper, and she was letter perfect on that, telling an essentially unvarnished version of the truth up to the point where his gun came into play, and then laying it out for them the way we’d worked it out. My story was the same, and the physical evidence supported it. His fingerprints were on the gun, right where you’d expect to find them, and the paraffin test revealed nitrate