Free Backward-Facing Man by Don Silver

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    The street in front of Puckman Security filled with neighbors. Because it was Saturday, those who would have been at work were home, and hearing the ambulance, they came outside in their bathrobes and sweatsuits, unshaven, ungroomed. They spoke in hushed tones reserved for the direst of circumstances. It was cold. Word spread quickly that one of the Gutierrez boys was down, barely breathing, and that another tragedy had befallen the little Puckman dynasty.
    â€œThey been here since the beginning of time, and nothing’s ever happened,” a woman in a housedress marveled.
    â€œIt’s like the Kennedys,” an old man with a hearing aid said.
    â€œI didn’t know they were Catholic.”
    â€œWhat do they make in there?” a girl mumbled from beneath a castle of hair.
    â€œSecurity cages,” the woman answered. “Like you see in them check-cashing places.”
    â€œCar armor, too,” a teenage boy said. “Bulletproof. I saw them test one once.”
    â€œHush,” his mother said, as a man approached aiming a beat-up video camera at them.
    Coleman Porter wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but because in this neighborhood he was usually first on the scene, he was something of an authority. Three years ago, he broke the Kensington cockfights. Last spring, he was the photographer who found a hooker’s mangled corpse under I-95. He owed his good fortune to three things: a police scanner he kept under the seat of his pickup, a penchant for wandering and sticking his nose into other people’s business, and a girlfriend whose apartment and Internet connection he persistently, and without permission, shared.
    Immediately, people invoked the mannerisms of bystanders.
    â€œCan someone tell me what happened?” Porter asked, angling his rig to get a shot of the factory in the background.
    â€œI think somebody’s hurt.”
    â€œThese things come in threes.”
    â€œAfter Charlie’s stroke, I knew something bad was gonna happen,” the old man wheezed.
    Porter turned his camera off and slid through the gate toward the front entrance. Red and white lights from the ambulance spun eerily across the factory walls, highlighting bare insulation, old tools, and boarded-up windows. A cluster of workers gathered around the boy, who was lying on the floor near the foreman’s station. From the perimeter, Coleman watched them—short, chunky, dark-haired men, Hispanic and black, young and old, wearing chinos and sweatshirts, watching desperately as a gray-haired, middle-aged guy in stylish black slacks and a black turtleneck knelt over the collapsed worker.
    Porter walked past some wooden crates that were pressed against one another. Completed, the security apparatuses looked like giant thick-framed glasses. Staying in the background, he climbed up on one and squinted to determine his best angle, his best light, and then zoomed in tight and let the tape roll. He was hoping he would catch the guy on the floor twitching involuntarily, gasping for air, writhing a little, anything that would improve the shot, but all he got was a crowd of people and the man in the turtleneck waving to the paramedics.
    Dismayed, Porter turned the camera off again and looked around. In the back of the shop, next to the welding booth, was a wood-paneled office with large windows and fluorescent lights. Framed in the glass door was the silhouette of a man. Porter trained the camera on him and zoomed in. He was fat and bald, and the top of his head was slick with perspiration. Ridges were visible on his splotchy scalp, which from a distance resembled the surface of the moon. His lips were thick and rubbery, and he kept licking them, his tongue darting out like a little garden snake. He blinked repeatedly behind his thick-framed glasses, which resembled miniature versions of the Plexiglas guards being assembled in the shop. Porter could tell even through the