Nobody Move by Denis Johnson Page A

hand, then onto his knees, both arms extended together. Luntz turned and flung himself to the ground, hearing gunshots, and his senses ceased functioning. When the darkness and silence ended he was over the side of the hill and standing behind the building and hearing the river, and now his senses were sharp, precise. He heard a car’s door slam. Heard the car’s ignition. Next he was standing in front of the restaurant again, cocking the gun’s action and pulling the trigger until the gun was empty. He saw the car’s taillights blink out down the road among the trees.
He was shaking, every muscle quivering. The breath shoved itself in and out of his lungs. He turned the weapon this way and that. When he touched its barrel, someone said, “Jesus!” and he wondered who was talking, and they said, “Fuck!” and he realized it was himself.
In the restaurant behind him, the lights came on. He saw small cylinders in the gravel at his feet. He had no shoes on. Only socks. To his knowledge, he hadn’t hit a thing.
He heard a siren—growing nearer, louder—but it was the wail of a human voice.
The restaurant’s door stood open. He went through it shouting, “Hey, hey, hey—” He didn’t know why.
Sally Fuck rose up from behind the counter, wailing like a siren and wringing blood from his hands.

    Sally came around the counter and sat on a stool and held his head in his gory fingers, his whole frame trembling.
Luntz said, “Is he dead?”
Sally raised his face. It looked like a gargoyle’s, sick and shining. He laughed, and then he sobbed so hard the spit flew from his throat.
Luntz said, “What now?”
No answer.
“Sally—Sol. Sol. What now, man?”
“I don’t know.”
Luntz laid the shotgun on the counter and leaned over it to look at John Capra. Sally had tried to turn him over, evidently, and smeared Capra’s blood in a swath across the floor. The face was turned toward the stove. The back of the head had been scooped away and flung against the oven’s door. Luntz watched for movement. If somebody stared hard enough, Capra would move.
“We have to take care of this,” Sally said.
“Fine. I mean—fine,” Luntz said. “God. Oh, man.” A lot of ideas hammered at his head, most of them having to do with Capra coming suddenly alive.
Sally swung around on his stool and got his feet under him. He started for the back. “We need a pick and a shovel.”
“Gloves,” Luntz called after him. “Do you have any gloves?” He stood staring at his hands. The thumb on the right one was mottled red and blue and swollen at the joint—sprained by the shotgun’s recoil, maybe broken. He searched his nerves for some sensation of pain, felt none. He needed to go upstairs and get his shoes on, but he couldn’t form a plan for doing it.

    Mary had left a couple windows open and smoked whenever the impulse came. She held the ashtray in her lap and watched a desperate woman selling fourteen-carat jewelry on TV without a script to help her. By 1:00 a.m. Mary no longer heard even an occasional vehicle in the neighborhood.
Around three, a car cruised by. She turned the set off. The garage door rumbled. She heard a door open and close inside the garage, and then the car’s trunk lid. She stubbed out her cigarette.
Gambol labored through the door into the kitchen and replaced the revolver in the counter drawer, took a jug of milk from the refrigerator, and drank several deep swallows from it before shutting it away again.
Leaning heavily on his cane with every step, he came and sat beside her on the couch and lifted his bad leg with both hands and dumped it across the ottoman. In the middle of sitting back, he paused. “What I don’t understand about the whole thing,” he said, “is when the Twin Towers went down, why didn’t we just nuke the fuck out of those bastards and turn that whole Muslim desert to glass?” He sat all the way back and took one long breath and released it slowly.
“Hooray,” Mary said, “he