The only good Lawyer

over.”
    Huong kicked me once in the right hip, the blow vibrating all the way through my body. Then he planted a heel on the hip, and pushed hard.
    As I flopped over, I had to hold onto the inside fleece of the sweatshirt to keep my right arm from sliding my hand and gun out of the muffler pocket. But now my thumb was working, and I could feel it close around the butt of the revolver.
    Trinh’s face loomed into view from standing height above mine, the blue sky as backdrop giving the eerie sensation of being in a domed chapel, staring up at one of Lucifer’s failed angels.
    He said, “You don’t like me calling you ‘Mr. Private Eye,’ right? I can tell that, the first day Oscar and me in your office, the address where you live on the fucking bills I’m reading, waiting for you. Then you shining on about ‘jogging the river every morning,’ tell me where we can find you. Well, Mr. Private Eye, I want you looking at me when we take your fucking ‘private eyes,’ man. I’m the last thing you gonna see, just like you the last thing my Deborah see.”
    Trinh’s face swung toward Huong, and I let my head loll that way, too. Huong grinned at me as he stepped hard on my left elbow, pinning that arm to the ground. When I felt Trinh’s cowboy boot begin to come down on my right elbow, I bent my right wrist inside the muffler to bring the muzzle up against the cloth. As Huong came down with his thumbs set for gouging out eyes, I shot him twice in the chest, little puffs of fleece wafting into the air as my ears rang from the reports.
    Huong rocked back and over, and Trinh jumped back, too. I rolled away from Trinh as I cleared my gun hand from the sweatshirt, probably bellowing from the pain I caused myself in the ribs. Trinh had a nine-millimeter just about coming to bear on me when I pulled the trigger three times more, two slugs lifting his feet off the ground like somebody had lassoed him from behind, the semiautomatic clattering to the macadam as his back hit the path. There was no third shot because I’d had only four bullets in the five-shot cylinder.
    I turned, looking back at Huong. No movement I could see or noises I could hear.
    Trinh began wheezing. On hands and knees, I crawled over to him.
    “You... fucking... white…”
    “Nugey?”
    “You piece... of fucking—”
    “Nugey! Can you hear me?”
    More wheezing on the way in, but a burbling sound on the way out, the blood at the bullet hole in his parka frothing pink from underneath. In the Army we were taught to call that a “sucking chest wound.” Which meant no hope.
    Trinh’s eyes rolled a little before focusing on me. For a third time, I said, “Nugey?”
    “Hear... you....”
    “I didn’t kill Deborah Ling.”
    A smile, almost, blood at first trickling, then running down from the left, and lowers corner of his mouth. “Tell it... to a priest... you piece—”
    “I didn’t kill her, Nugey. Why do you think I did?”
    “Call...” A cough that sounded like something a plumber does to a clogged pipe.
    “Call who?” I said quickly, feeling him going.
    The head rolled left-right-left in slow motion, like Trinh wanted to shake it. “No... call me....”
    “Who called you?”
    “Gro... ver....”
    “Grover Gant?”
    “Try... to make... his voice... all funny.” The eyes started to rotate back into the skull.
    “Nugey, what did he say?”
    The eyes came down again, but the left one wouldn’t focus on me. “Said... ‘Cuddy... done... your lady.’ “
    “I didn’t.”
    “Fuck you... white… Fuck... you... all…”
    Then Nguyen Trinh made a gurgling sound like the plumbing pipe had broken, and he was gone.
    As I used my left thumb and index finger to close Trinh’s eyes, I heard a scuffling noise behind me. I was turning back when something like a battering ram hit my right cheekbone again, and the running path opened up into a long, deep tunnel that swallowed me whole before closing in over my head.

    Once, after I’d been shot, my first conscious impression was that polar bears were pawing and poking at me while I lay helpless on my back. For a minute, I thought I’d been dreaming about that scene, then I realized my left eye was open, and the man and woman in white were pretty clearly defined.
    “What time... is it?” my lips not working quite right.
    The woman said, “Maybe we should start with what day it is.”
    Great. “You first.”
    The man didn’t see the heroic humor in that. To me, he said,