In the immediate aftermath of the shooting Camel credited being alive to the simplicity of a design patented in 1835 by Mr. Colt because even if Parker Gray’s semiautomatic was cocked and locked, which Camel assumed it was, Gray still had to thumb-off a safety while Camel armed with a revolver could simply point and pull. It was the ever-readiness of Mr. Colt’s design, Camel figured, that gave him the edge over Gray and made Camel the cowboy left standing. But he was wrong.
Just as he’d been taught to do Camel had fired at the center of his target, Gray getting two rounds in the gut, quickly covering his stomach with a forearm, looking down at the sudden blood then up at Camel with questioning eyes.
By the time Camel reached him Gray was slowly folding onto his right side like something made of snow melting. He tried to break the fall but ended up dropping knee-hard in the gas-splashed corridor.
Camel bent down and moved Gray’s arm to see that one round had hit his western-style belt buckle, holing the buckle and entering flesh but only superficially while the second round went on in unimpeded making a neat entry wound just to the left of Gray’s navel. The kind of wide-mouthed hollow points with which McCleany’s .38 revolver had been loaded are designed to spread on contact for two advantages … one, they won’t penetrate most walls so you don’t end up shooting someone in the next room when you didn’t even know the guy was there and, two, after a hollow point enters flesh through a small hole it spreads open its mouth and starts chewing up tissue like a Mixmaster set on purée … except Parker Gray in his current condition wouldn’t of course list this second point as an advantage.
Camel was on his knees next to Gray who said, “Oh Christ call an ambulance huh?”
Camel placed Gray’s forearm back over the wound and debated telling him the truth: too late for ambulances, you got maybe a couple of minutes before you bleed to death or die of shock.
“Jesus.” He groaned and said Jesus again. “I thought you didn’t feel the pain until later, isn’t that what everybody says huh?”
Camel took the pistol from Gray’s hand. The thumb safety was on as Camel had thought but the 9mm was not cocked and locked, no round in the chamber, the hammer still seated. Gray must’ve known the pistol was not ready to fire, which meant, regardless of the efficiency of Mr. Colt’s patented revolver, Camel had not out-cowboyed anyone … Gray had used him to commit suicide.
There on the floor on his side he began contracting slow-motion into the fetal position like something wet drying up. “Jesus … you think it’s going to get worse than this huh?” He meant the pain.
“You’re not going to make it Parker.”
“Don’t say that,” Gray pleaded, his voice whispering out from somewhere within that fetal curl, commenting again how much it hurt. “Call an ambulance huh, there’s still a chance …”
“No there’s not.”
“Hardhearted bastard.”
“You’re dying, what can I say?”
“You fucked me up good.”
Camel thought, you fucked yourself.
Gray’s blood mixed with gasoline on the floor making a petroleum-protein pool spreading out to confirm Camel’s prognosis … you can’t leak that much blood and live.
“Teddy.”
Hearing his name in a voice so softly pathetic made Camel’s face twinge like Steve McQueen’s when he played a bad character regretting he was about to do something good. “Parker, you Catholic?”
Gray nodded.
“Want to confess?”
“I already told you everything—”
“I’m not talking about who killed that girl, I mean—”
“My soul?”
“Last rites. You don’t necessarily need a priest, any Catholic can perform them in a pinch.”
“In a pinch huh,” Gray said like it was a joke except of course neither man laughed. He paused to consider then agreed, “Okay.”
Camel and Gray stumbled through what they remembered of confession and final rites. Afterward Gray held tightly to Camel’s hand and said, “She’s upstairs in a corner room on the second floor, I left the key in the padlock … I’m sorry.”
“You were going to burn her alive.”
“I’m sorry.”
Camel didn’t say anything, didn’t let him off the hook.
“Hey Teddy you’re seriously fucked too … shooting me like this.”
Gray was right. The manslaughter charge relating to Paul Milton’s death might have been dropped but now Camel had fatally shot a state police associate superintendent, the man who pushed for Camel’s arrest, and it’s going to look like Camel did it for revenge, going to be hell’s own time proving justifiable self-defense, proving that Gray had used Camel to commit suicide.
“Give me something to write on,” Gray said.
Camel dug out a notepad and pen.
“Oh Christ … Teddy … going into … is this it huh … really dying?”
Camel didn’t answer except to cradle Gray’s head.
“You got it, something to write with?”
He held pen and pad ready.
Gray blinked a couple of times like he was thinking things through. “I’m going to write, ‘Teddy Camel shot me in self-defense.’ I’ll write it was justifiable … no crime committed. Help me huh, I’m doing this to save your ass.”
Camel had to bend Gray’s fingers around the pen, then steady the notepad on the floor as Gray forced himself to write … interrupted by a spasm that quickly drew him back into that fetal curl. “Dying,” he said with a sense of astonishment.
“Yeah,” Camel confirmed, wondering too late if simply on principle he should’ve called an ambulance … then he remembered the phone here at Cul-De-Sac was disabled.
Gray had collapsed onto the notepad. When he was still, was dead, Camel dug it out. Gray had scrawled his signature followed by this: “Teddy Camel shot me in—” But that’s as far as he made it. Didn’t get to “self-defense,” much less “justifiable” or “no crime was committed.” Show this to a prosecutor and she could argue Gray intended to finish his dying statement any number of ways: Teddy Camel shot me in … cold blood.
Camel tore off the page anyway, put it in a pocket and checked his watch, ten P.M. on the nose. As he was standing he heard a noise behind him, Camel wheeling to see Jake Kempis there in the corridor.
“Jesus Teddy what’ve you done?”
Killed a man, Camel thought, the full awareness of it sinking in, soaking right through to his core … I have just now killed a man.