November 19 — 8:03 am
The Idiot With the Pistol
Eager Gillespie once told me he’d be more likely to shit a diamond than live to see his twenty-first birthday. I dumped his beer anyway and he wandered off, shaking his head at the cruel injustice of it all. It would be almost a year before I see him again, in the street out front of my house—still years shy of drinking age but just in time to catch a bullet with his face.
The police have surrounded the house across from mine, established a temporary command center in my living room. Doesn’t bother me, being a once-upon-a-time cop myself, though it might have been nice if they’d used the magic word before hijacking my Sumatra Mandheling and high-speed internet connection. Inside the target house huddles the man who’d fired the shot which scattered his family like a flock of juncos shadowed by a hawk. The police have emptied the adjacent homes on all sides, pushed onlookers out of the tactical sight lines. A cluster of press vans are double-parked a block away. The blades of the news chopper circling above beat out a staccato background music which seems tuned to the cadence of my heart.
Watching through my dining room window, I first catch sight of Eager among the crowd straining against the barricades the cops have erected. Near me, the negotiator speaks calmly into a captive cell phone whose mate has been tossed through the open front door across the street. The man with the gun—my neighbor for chrissakes, fellow named Mitch Bronstein—doesn’t have much to say. No one knows what set him off. His wife Luellen, a fifteen-year younger corn-fed trophy from down south—Klamath Basin, NoCal, Utah, somewhere—is no use. She seems to be in shock. Aside from answering my question about their little boy— “he’s with his grandfather now” —she’s got nothing to say. I can’t tell if she’s pleased about grandpa or not. The older boy, a sweaty eighteen-year-old with a video gamer’s sullen detachment, identifies the gun as some kind of revolver. “Something big.” Spoken with cold self-possession. “Maybe an S&W 500.” No other guns in sight. So the cops figure best case is four hammer-blow rounds in the cylinder, assuming the kid knows a Model 500 from his left nut. Next best is Mitch topped off after his wife and son fled. But maybe he has something tucked in his waistband too. Worst case could be pretty bad when you spun out the potential scenarios—gun shows make anything possible. Thus the captive phone, the command team in my living room, the calm-voiced negotiator.
