Lousiana Hotshot

shoulders. How the hell had they gotten into it?
    Talba stopped and watched. The cops were apparently in the act of trying to arrest the Baron, or at least get him the hell out of there, and Toes was going crazy. “You let him go! Let my brother go! Swear to God if you don’t let him go, gon’ kill this motherfucker!” He jumped Tony, pulled him into a death hug, and stuck the gun in his ear. Cassandra whimpered. Talba was close enough to see that the girl’s hands were tied behind her. She couldn’t see her feet.
    She continued moving. What if she came up behind Toes and shot him in the back? She didn’t rule it out.
    At this point, she certainly didn’t.
    Some cop told Toes to take it easy, and backed away from the Baron, who talked quietly with him a few minutes. After some amount of palaver, they both nodded and the Baron again picked up his megaphone. “Let him go, bro’. S’pose you kill him— what happens then? Then they kill
you.
And our mama never stop cryin’.”
    “You don’t own me, T. I’m my own man, goddammit! You don’t
own
me!” He sounded like Pamela’s father yelling about
his
daughter. What was it the sound of? What did it mean?
    Furious.
    Well, sure.
    Powerless and desperate.
    What could she do with that? Desperate for what?
    Pamela’s father needed his daughter back; Toes needed what he said he had— to be his own man. To feel free of his brother.
    She was somewhat to his left now, still a long way from his rear flank. But this was her shot. She saw the one thing she could do.
    She rolled down the sleeves on her Indian-style top and measured. Both covered her hands, and the right one almost covered the gun. An inch or two stuck out, but maybe he wouldn’t notice. She stepped into the clearing where he could see her; she was close, no more than fifty feet from him. She held her hands at her sides.
    A roar went up from the cops. “What the fuck! Get that woman out of there!
Goddammit!”
    As if they could do anything about her.
    She said, “I didn’t call the cops. He did.” She jerked her head toward the Baron. “I tried to talk him out of it”
    “Fuck you, T!” He shoved Tony to the ground and pointed the gun at his brother.
    Talba fired.

Chapter 26
    She had no idea the shot would be so loud. She stood there in shock, half-deaf, and men were pointing guns, shouting. “Drop the gun!”
    “Drop it!”
    “Put your hands on top of your head!”
    It didn’t occur to her they were talking to her until she heard Tony calling her name. “Talba! Drop it, or they’ll shoot you!”
    She’d forgotten she was holding a gun. It was like part of her now aching arm, but she felt her fingers release it, saw it fall to the ground. “Cassandra?” she said, and the girl answered. For a second, a second fragment, really, a blink, she had that sick feeling again, that about-to-faint feeling, and once again, she heard her name: “Talba!”
    When she opened her eyes, a cop was standing over her, taking her pulse, putting something under her feet. The noise was unbearable— people shouting, sirens blaring, newscasters mouthing their spiels. Nasty harsh lights shone in her eyes, from the televison cameras. She closed them again.
    It was big-time turtle-time. She stayed like that, in a near coma, for nearly the whole time it took the ambulance to get there and whiz back to Charity, coming out of it only once. When they got her on a stretcher and put her in it, when she caught on that that was what they were really doing, she said, “Am I shot?”
    And someone answered, “No, you’re okay. You’ll be fine.”
    She wanted Tony with her in the ambulance, but she couldn’t poke her head far enough out of her shell to mention it.
    They had an awful time with her in the emergency room, couldn’t seem to bring her around. She knew because she was partly awake; what she was doing was perhaps a form of playing possum, she wasn’t sure, honestly didn’t know if she could come fully back if she wanted to. What she did know was she didn’t want to.
    She had learned things in that sorry swamp. It wasn’t even a swamp, just a wet piece of woods, a pathetic, ugly place, and she’d learned pathetic, ugly things there. She had seen her whole life pass before her in the moment she shot Toes. Or enough of it to know the rest was a sham.
    When she felt the kick from the gun, she knew. She knew she’d felt it before. When Toes fell, when she saw the blood, the unstoppable scarlet fluid