It's Not a Pretty Sight by Gar Anthony Haywood Page A

more than that and he was dead. And maybe he was dead anyway, because he knew now that his cheek wasn’t burning, it was bleeding; cut open with the pair of Mickey’s scissors he could see in his foe’s right hand. He tried to get up, but couldn’t; the black man above him was kneeling on his chest, hard, pinning him down. Rolling to one side or the other proved equally impossible. He had no strength to fight. There was nothing to do but watch the scissors ascend, high overhead, and then—
    He pulled the Ruger’s trigger.
    The shop flashed white with the weapon’s report and his would-be killer froze, Mickey’s scissors suspended in time above his right ear. The bullet had hit him only inches above and to the left of his groin, leaving behind an entry wound slowly staining his pants red. His face was a mask of utter disbelief. Gunner bucked to throw the man off him and scrambled to his feet. He heard the scissors hit the floor and skitter off to distant parts unknown.
    When he thought he could afford the luxury, he located the nearest wastebasket and threw up in it, feeling only slightly better than he had immediately after his dance with Russell Dartmouth. Two days of lying on his back down the fucking drain.
    The bleeding man on the floor stirred, moaning, but was clearly capable of little else, so Gunner turned his attention to Foley. He found him with his eyes open, staring sideways at Gunner’s shoes. He was struggling to free the hands taped behind his back, and was shouting against the hand towel that had been stuffed into his mouth. Blood was leaking from his nose, and his left eye was nearly swollen shut, but otherwise he appeared to be okay.
    “How you doing, Foley?” Gunner asked him, when he’d removed the gag from his mouth. “You all right?”
    “He made me call you, man,” Foley said, sounding sad enough to cry. “I swear I didn’t want to, but he made me! Motherfucker said—”
    “Forget it. No harm done. Come on, get up off the floor, I’ll call you a doctor.”
    He lifted the older man onto his feet and guided him back into the barber chair he’d fallen out of. He could hear their friend on the floor grunting and groaning as he worked to unbind Foley’s hands, but he didn’t bother to turn around until he was done, satisfied that the man was no longer a threat to anyone. And he was right. The man he saw when he finally looked for him again was far closer to the dead than the living. He’d forced himself up to a sitting position, back braced against the nearest wall, and grown still, eyes open but unseeing, both hands clasped over his ruptured middle. Only the faint movement of his lips lent any credence to the idea that he was not already dead.
    Gunner had only seen Michael Pearson two or three times in his life, but he felt relatively certain this was he.
    “Is he …” Foley started to ask.
    “No,” Gunner said. “Not yet. But he will be soon, I don’t get an ambulance out here for him fast.” He went to the phone on the counter nearby and called 911.
    “An ambulance? What you wanna call an ambulance for him for? Sonofabitch almost killed us both, he wants a doctor, let him go get one for hisself!”
    “I wish I could, Foley, but—” He had to cut the sentence off and gesture for Foley’s silence when his 911 call abruptly went through. He made it brief, reporting a shooting and requesting an ambulance without preamble. Then he hung up, in the face of a determined dispatcher gamely trying to press him for more details.
    Afterward, he went to check on Pearson.
    “I didn’t kill the bitch,” the wounded man said when Gunner knelt down beside him, blood bubbling up at both corners of his mouth. A thirty-something pretty boy, light-skinned, square-jawed, thinly mustachioed. His voice had been almost too soft to hear, but his tone was unmistakably upbeat. He thought what he’d said was funny.
    “Shut up and save your strength,” Gunner said.
    “I wanted to kill her