called the Alka-Seltzer Mass, because he said all the people with hangovers went to that one. It was just a bit before Thanksgiving, and because this was Florida we pretended it wasn’t so hot and had the windows open.
The program I was watching was broken into by a news bulletin.
A rare live broadcast. Outside shot of an armored car. Inside shot, lots of photographers with those cameras where the flashbulb attachment is bigger than the camera itself. All suits except one dressed in a white shirt and thin pullover sweater.
Not a white hat; no one was wearing hats at the courthouse. Then, not enough security, I thought, and pushed harder, trying to decide whether it was better to get to Zach first or Lynch first or make a big enough scene so Max would be forced to pay attention.
In the broadcast I was remembering, a man stepped out of the crowd of reporters, a thickish man who got too close. He raised a weapon and fired it into the other man’s stomach. Someone in a white suit who was leaning forward, clearing a way through the reporters, jerked his hands back to his body, his head back over his chest and even his lips back from his teeth as if every part of his body was intuitively drawing back from the line of fire.
I was the only one who knew, in a way, that this was happening again, and I failed to stop it.
Too late, as Lynch got halfway up the steps, Zach broke from the crowd, ran forward, and yelled, “Lynch!” As the man turned, Zach fired a single shot at Lynch’s gut. Lynch closed his eyes, opened his mouth in a soundless groan, and clutched his stomach. And there was the lip, curled up over his teeth. Startled, Max jerked his hands back to his body, his head back over his chest and his lips back from his teeth as if every part of his body was intuitively drawing back from the line of fire.
Too late to reach Lynch, I turned my attention back to Zach. He looked at me again, gave the first smile I’d seen in seven years, which made him a totally different man, lifted the gun again. The crowd went wilder, the camera crews simultaneously ducked and raised their equipment over their heads to capture someone getting killed.
At the Texas police station it had been a snub-nosed Colt Cobra .38, the victim had been Lee Harvey Oswald, and the killer had been a small-time Nevada crook named Jack Ruby. Unlike that weapon, the one Zach used was just a .22, not much of a gun. But different from that time, rather than allowing himself to be taken by the police officers, Zach pressed the trigger and shot himself in the head.
Thirty-two
Once Zach dropped and the gun fell from his hand, photographers and cameramen swarmed forward while crouching down, staying low for fear of more gunfire but keeping their equipment raised overhead for the sake of a Pulitzer. Security from the courthouse swarmed back, linking arms, able to at least keep an opening for the emergency med techs who showed up within a long two minutes, one ambulance taking Lynch away and the other taking Zach. I wormed my way onto the latter and sat with Zach while the EMTs worked. He wasn’t used to firearms, the gun must have kicked, and he was aiming high to begin with, so death wasn’t immediate. He wanted to talk. I tried to shush him, but the paramedic told me it was better, with a brain injury, to keep him conscious.
“Got ’im,” Zach said, with a physical effort that went beyond anything I’d personally known.
“You sure did, buddy.” I glanced at the blood on his shirt, the blowback from Lynch mixed with that of his own head wound. You could still see the package creases in this shirt, too. He had put on a new shirt to kill Lynch.
Zach ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, moistening it enough to speak. “No life.”
I assumed he was talking about Lynch’s sentence just then, but he could have been talking about himself, that his own just wasn’t worth it anymore. I took his hand in mine, stroked it with the other. “Zach, dearest, why didn’t you talk to me?”
His eyes started to go up into his head and then came back down again. He grimaced with a sudden pain. “Dead?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure. “Sure Zach, he’s dead.”
He