Free Running Dog by Don DeLillo

bullets, flying glass. The man who’d been sitting on the step crawled moaning toward the door, trailing blood, one arm limp. The gunman was out of the doorway, moving, hit possibly. Selvy had the distinct impression he’d been hit.
    He got to his feet and stepped over the crawling man. He heard a car move off. The old woman lunged at him and he gave her an elbow that drove her to the floor. There was still a roar in his head but the street was quiet and he didn’t bother checking for blood. It was academic really, whether he’d hit the man. No concern of his. A technicality.
    He returned the .38 to the break-front holster on his belt. Moll came out on the sidewalk. Her expression was comical. She seemed more amazed by the fact that he’d been carrying a gun than by the rest of it, the man spraying the place with automatic fire, the dead and wounded.
    “I saw him,” she said. “I looked up at the end. What was he wearing? He looked so strange. He stood there trying to see into the room. He was wearing something on his ears and face.”
    “Tinted glasses. Shooting glasses, for ricocheting bullet fragments. And ear protectors, for noise.”
    “Who was he? There are people dead in there. What the hell happened?”
    “I don’t think he was familiar with the weapon. He was letting the muzzle climb when he fired. That weapon’s designed to prevent that.”
    “But who the hell was he? What happened?”
    “He had his right elbow at the wrong angle. He had it pointed way down. Your elbow should be straight out, parallel to the ground, firing that particular weapon.”
    “Jesus, will you stop?” she said. “Will you tell me what happened?”
    Her sweater and shirt were covered with the bartender’s blood. She stood there trembling. He gave her a crooked little smile and shook his head, genuinely regretful that he wasn’t able to bring some light to the situation.
    A couple of kids came out of a doorway to approach Selvy near the shattered front of Frankie’s Tropical Bar.
    “We see the whole thing.”
    “How much you give us to testify?”
    “We make a deal, man.”
    “It was Patty Hearst with a machine gun.”
    “No, man, it was Stevie Wonder. You see his headset? He was shooting to the music.”

II
Radial Matrix
1

    She parked at the very limit of a dead-end street overlooking Rock Creek. It was a warm evening, kids chasing each other in a playground just yards away. The house was red brick, fairly large, attached (how strange, she thought) to a common brown frame house that seemed totally out of place here. How strange and interesting. She approached the brick house, noting that the door-knocker was a bronze eagle.
    Lloyd Percival made flattering remarks. He remembered what she’d been wearing on their previous encounter in the corridors of the Senate wing. And commented on the reduced frizz-content of her hair. They sat around a cherrywood cocktail table in a large room filled mostly with period furniture and decorated in spruce green Colonial wallpaper. The first hour was boring, at least for Moll.
    “And Mrs. Percival?”
    “Spends most of her time back home. Doesn’t like Washington. Never has. We’ve grown apart, I’m afraid. Divorce in progress.”
    “What does she do?”
    “She curls up with the Warren Report. She’s been reading the Warren Report for eight or nine years. Nine years, I make it. The full set. Twenty-six volumes. She wears a bed jacket.”
    “You have two married daughters.”
    It went on like this. Percival had a second drink. He sat stoop-shouldered in a wing sofa, his deep friendly voice droning on. Even with his beady eyes and his small and somewhat flat-top head, Moll found his presence genial and even serene. He was the kind of man people feel at ease with. Large, shaggy and quietly ironic. She curled up in her chair, enveloped by the room’s cozy mood.
    “I still don’t understand why I didn’t have you screened. We screen people like you.”
    “My fried hair.