Gone Tomorrow

got there.
    The gun barrel moved back to my center mass. Then it moved vertical. For a split second I thought the woman was surrendering. But the barrel kept on moving. The woman raised her chin high, like a proud, obstinate gesture. She tucked the muzzle into the soft flesh beneath it. Squeezed the trigger halfway. The cylinder turned and the hammer scraped back across the nylon of her coat.
    Then she pulled the trigger the rest of the way and blew her own head off.

Chapter 6
    The doors didn’t open for a long time. Maybe someone had used the emergency intercom or maybe the conductor had heard the shot. But whatever, the system went into full-on lockdown mode. It was undoubtedly something they rehearsed. And the procedure made a lot of sense. Better that a crazed gunman was contained in a single car, rather than being allowed to run around all over town.
    But the waiting wasn’t pleasant. The .357 Magnum round was invented in 1935. Magnum is Latin for big . Heavier bullet, and a lot more propellant charge. Technically the propellant charge does not explode. It deflagrates, which is a chemical process halfway between burning and exploding. The idea is to create a huge bubble of hot gas that accelerates the bullet down the barrel, like a pent-up spring. Normally the gas follows the bullet out of the muzzle and sets fire to the oxygen in the air close by. Hence muzzle flash. But with a hard contact shot to the head like passenger number four had chosen, the bullet makes a hole in the skin and the gas pumps itself straight in after it. It expands violently under the skin and either rips itself a huge star-shaped exit wound, or it blows all the flesh and skin right off the bone and unwraps the skull completely, like peeling a banana upside down.
    That was what had happened in this case. The woman’s face was reduced to rags and tatters of bloody flesh hanging off shattered bone. The bullet had traveled vertically through her mouth and had dumped its massive kinetic energy in her brain pan, and the sudden huge pressure had sought relief and found it where the plates of her skull had sealed themselves way back in childhood. They had burst open again and the pressure had pasted three or four large fragments of bone all over the wall above and behind her. One way or the other her head was basically gone. But the graffiti-resistant fiberglass was doing its job. White bone and dark blood and gray tissue was running down the slick surface, not sticking, leaving thin snail trails behind. The woman’s body had collapsed into a slumped position on the bench. Her right index finger was still hooked through the trigger guard. The gun had bounced off her thigh and was resting on the seat next to her.
    The sound of the shot was still ringing in my ears. Behind me I could hear muted sounds. I could smell the woman’s blood. I ducked forward and checked her bag. Empty. I unzipped her jacket and opened it up. Nothing there. Just a white cotton blouse and the stink of voided bowel and bladder.
    I found the emergency panel and called through to the conductor myself. I said, “Suicide by gunshot. Last-but-one car. It’s all over now. We’re secure. No further threat.” I didn’t want to wait until the NYPD assembled SWAT teams and body armor and rifles and came in all stealthy. That could take a long time.
    I didn’t get a reply from the conductor. But a minute later his voice came through the train PA. He said, “Passengers are advised that the doors will remain closed for a few minutes due to an evolving incident.” He spoke slowly. He was probably reading from a card. His voice was shaky. Not at all like the smooth tones of the Bloomberg anchors.
    I took a last look around the car and sat down three feet from the headless corpse and waited.
    Whole episodes of TV cop shows could have run before the real-life cops even arrived. DNA could have been extracted and analyzed, matches could have been made, perpetrators could have been hunted and caught and tried and sentenced. But eventually six officers came down the stairs. They were in caps and vests and they had drawn their weapons. NYPD patrolmen on the night shift, probably out of the 14th Precinct on West 35th Street, the famous Midtown South. They ran along the platform and started checking the train from the front. I got up again and watched through the windows above the couplers, down the whole length of the train, like peering into a long lit-up stainless-steel tunnel.