Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (i am reading a book TXT) 📕

farther at him from outside. Perhaps there’d been somebody downstairs all along, hiding in the corners, waiting. They’d get Franklin and they’d get him too. They’d know. He shuddered. Franklin. They’d said he couldn’t stay hidden long. It was ghastly, how they could say something like that with such authority, as if it were a common, easily observable phenomenon—a man being unable to change even though his life was at stake. It’s not like that, thought July. It’s not like that. A person’s pushed to his limit and he’ll go to it. There’s no other choice. Franklin, without family now, without position and respectability, would simply learn to live all over again, and at nearly fifty would light out for the unexplored West. This had to be—otherwise there’d be nothing more to life than those two things, family and respectability. Great as these things were, there had to be something greater, a reason—

At this point the discharge of a gun downstairs filled the building. July ran to his door. Crossing to the stairs, he heard glass shatter and the banging of the door. He took the flight of stairs in three long bounds, hit the first floor and arrived at the office at just the time he saw Bailey, still in uniform, crossing the showroom from the front. Inside, Carroll lay across the top of the desk, dark blood running from beneath his ear, the safe behind him opened and a pistol in his hand. July glanced once at the policeman and without a thought leaped for the gun.

“Wait!” yelled Bailey, jumping behind a sofa and pulling out his revolver, aiming it directly at the middle of the office doorway. July, waving the pistol, looking wildly about for him, filled the space.

“Wait!” yelled Bailey again, having July’s heart in his sights knowing that it was to be decided in the next tenth of a second, before he could say another word. The couch that partially hid him would be like holding up a piece of paper in front of the .38. After July’s first shot he’d have to kill him. He was scared. He saw July’s eyes find him, burning with uncontrollable passion: the gun came over.

“Wait,” Bailey yelled, “I didn’t do it! For God’s sake, kid, I didn’t do it! Feel the gun! Feel the gun!” He watched the struggle go on in July’s eyes, like the smaller child on a seesaw, kicking his legs and rocking back and forth to get the heavier end up in the air. At first it looked as though he couldn’t do it and Bailey tightened down on the trigger. Then he saw him begin to think. All of this in a period of about a second, as it began to come to July what it meant. What a fool, thought Bailey, I should’ve said it more clearly. “He shot himself!” he yelled. There was not the slightest hint of fear in July’s expression. He felt the barrel with his left hand, and stood there holding it in this awkward fashion. He turned back to look at Carroll and at the same time he lowered the weapon. Bailey stood up and came quickly forward, sensing this to be a critical time to get hold of the gun, before he changed his mind again. He gently took it away.

“I’m sorry,” he said, left July and went over to the desk. He took up the phone and dialed a number. “This is Bailey. Better send some people over here. Carroll just shot himself. . . . No, nobody was hurt. . . . He’s dead.”

He replaced the receiver. July came farther into the room. Bailey picked up the checkbook on the desk, opened it up, refolded it and put it in his shirt pocket.

“Sorry,” he said again. “You’d be surprised how often it’d happen this way . . . or how many times they’ll try to outshoot you, which is all the same. Seems odd, doesn’t it?”

July turned and went upstairs.

“We’ll want to ask you some questions,” said Bailey, but July didn’t stop and walked all the way to his room and shut the door. He sat and waited for them to come and get him. Cars arrived and more men came in. Talking. More cars. More talking. An hour went by. Then two. Finally he heard someone coming up, but it was just a policeman to take down his full name.

Then everything was quiet for a long time; then the sun filled the windows with light and then Murphy, this time in uniform, knocked on the door and let himself in. The clock above the television set said eleven fifteen.

“I was wondering what you were doing up here,” he said, and sat down. “Thinking, I suppose. Say, you’re the kid who used to sell papers down near City Hall, aren’t you? Mrs. Carroll said that and we sort of remembered then.”

July nodded.

“It’s funny,” Murphy continued. “In some ways that seems like a long time ago—I mean, that was before I was even on the city’s payroll, and worked over at Westinghouse. Boy, that seems like a long time ago. I can remember going to work on the trolley at night—I worked the eleven-to-seven shift, and coming home Sunday mornings if I worked Saturday, when there’d be nobody on the streets, and I’d feel especially smug about being up and around then, like it was just me and the pigeons. But in some ways it wasn’t so long ago. I mean, what was that—five years? Must be.At the same time you’d think five years’d be longer than that. I was twenty-nine then—almost thirty. What do you think of that?”

“Nothing.”

“No, I don’t suppose. Look, we don’t have anything on you, and as far as we can tell, you’ve never been in any trouble before, right?”

“Right.”

“So you’re free, white and twenty-one, as the old saying goes. Jesus, you do have a lot of books here.” He stood up and went to the door. “And, personally, I think