The staked Goat

far as I could. Still toward the gate. His next round sprayed stone shards into the left side of my face.
    ”Closer that time, wasn’t I, asshole?” he called. ”I read about you in the paper but I missed you at the hospital.”
    I rolled three or four yards, came up in a crouch. I still hadn’t spotted him, but his voice was moving with me.
    ”Since when do chickenshits like you read, Marco?”
    I slipped on a patch of ice and his shot caught me in the left calf. I clamped down hard and swallowed a scream. I dragged myself on elbows as fast as I could. If he saw the blood, he’d have a perfect trail and pick up his pace.
    ”So, no piece, huh, asshole?” said Marco, sounding a lot closer than I wanted to place him. ”That’s how I found you, you know. I told the woman at the hospital office I was your partner and was bringing you your gun. Hah. The stupid clit told me you was meeting your wife. I thanked her real nice.”
    I tried my left leg. Gingerly. It wouldn’t push me at all. I shifted over to my right leg and raised up to a three-point stance. I could hold it only for two counts. I sagged back down into the snow.
    ”You know,” said Marco, maybe twenty feet away, ”I checked around on you. After the trial. I found out you went to Pittsburgh. I also heard in a bar down the street that your wife was dead and buried here and that you was queer for her.” His voice was circling me. ”After what the hospital broad said, I froze my ass for hours out in the car, by the gate back there. I knew you’d come.”
    He stopped talking, he was where he should have seen—
    ”Blood? Oh, did I get you, asshole? Or still bleeding from last night? Either way, don’t matter. It’s like Hansel and what’s her face, followin’ the bread crumbs.”
    A giant 747, on its declining approach to Logan, passed in majestic thunder three hundred feet above our heads. It drowned out everything. I edged around the headstone I’d picked, keeping it between Marco’s last position and me.
    The plane roar subsided. I didn’t hear anything. Couldn’t hear anything but my own heart, pounding in my ears and pumping life out the holes in my arm and leg.
    ”Behind you, asshole,” he said from four feet away.
    I stayed rabbit still.
    ”From where I stand, I can see a hole in your left leg, just below the knee.”
    I exhaled.
    ”Come on, shithead, turn around. I wanna see your eyes when I do you.”
    ”Marco—” I said.
    ”Turn around!”
    I turned but my right arm gave way, so I flopped over, like a fish struggling for air on top of a frozen pond.
    He was standing, looking down at me, long-barreled revolver in his right hand and pointed at me.
    ”Oh, this is good, asshole, this is very fuckin’ good.”
    ”When I had your brother like this,” I said, weakly as I could, ”I stepped on his shoulder, on his wound, Marco, till he did what I wanted.”
    Marco’s expression screwed up in rage. He took a step toward me, then stopped. His face relaxed. Sort of.
    ”Nice try, shithead. You had me going there for a minute. Joey told me about what you did. He told me, all right. But I’m just gonna chip away at you, a part at a time, till I only got one bullet left. Then I’m gonna drill you. Dead square in the face,” Marco jeered, cocking his revolver. ”In your face.”
    The barrel mouth slid toward my good leg. I was out of ideas. I thought of Nancy and Beth, Martha and Al Junior. Of unclaimed book envelopes gathering dust in a post office. The waste of it all.
    I heard a shot and a second, and a slug thumped the ground next to me as a third and a fourth and...
    Marco pitched toward me, the monument between us throwing a stationary hip-check on him. There was a clicking noise behind him as he slumped and tumbled over the stone. His face crunched into a small marker at my feet. There were two gaping, burbling holes in his back. I released a long breath and raised unsteadily to face the clicking.
    She was propped against a waist-level cross. A bloodstain the size of a baseball cap was spreading on her shoulder. Her clothes looked like she’d been the mold for a snow-woman. Her eyes were open, but her trigger finger kept driving home the shrouded hammer of the Bodyguard, methodically, reflexively.
    I limped over to her. I put my hand on her gun arm. She stopped pulling the trigger. I gently pried the weapon from her clamped fingers. A police car, lights flashing, no siren, came barreling into the cemetery and up the