"At this point I notice two Statics who're also most likely also in for cases have come to their senses. Prolly only a few seconds've gone by since Sheila came flyin' in the courtroom, just seemed like a year or two. The two Statics're sittin' onna left inna row ah chairs just inside the railing. Now they're outta their chairs, bustin' their way through the people inna room. And they land on her like a big pair of bears and take the gun away from her. Those guys knew what they were doing. One of them held his gun on her, stomped on her right wrist on the floor so she couldn't move it, and the other one bent over and pried the gun out of it.
"You can see that I am finding it very hard to do serious thinking at this point, even though as a general rule I'm not bad at it. But I'm gradually getting' the hang of it back. I first see her start scrabblin' around onna floor, I don't like the looks of it. I know there is some reason why I do not want this woman getting up from off the floor with that pistol in her hand. Now I'm figuring it out. She may be a perfectly nice lady, neighbors all speak well of her; but she also may decide to shoot me, and I don't want that to happen. I am now very clear on that.
"What I'm not clear on yet is what I should do so that wont happen. And I know that if you're not an expert, trained to handle the kind of dangerous situation you're in, you shouldn't do anything. Otherwise you're liable to do more harm'n good. Everybody knows that. Moving an accident victim: they've been tellin' us since grade school that unless you're an expert, never move an injured person 'less you gotta: if you don't he'll burn to death, or there'll be an explosion that'll blow him all to bits. You move him when you don't hafta and you paralyze his back. He will sue your sorry ass to Jerusalem, and you'll wish you'd stood back and watched the fucking bastard die. Maybe tossed a match or something. So, knowing that, I just stood there, deer-in-the-headlights."
The waiter, an unfamiliar elderly man, delivered Merrion's chicken salad. Hilliard ordered a second glass of the house red. Merrion said: "No, make that a bottle. I'll need at least two glasses to go with this." The waiter nodded gravely and departed.
"I hope he can get back to us by midnight," Hilliard said.
"He's in the same condition I was in this morning," Merrion said. "The way I felt after the gun went off."
"Yeah, but yours was apparently temporary," Hilliard said. "His looks permanent."
"It's a very strange feeling," Merrion said. "Out-of-the-body experience. Other people're waking up. Running around all over the place, whooping an' hollering, bloody murder, which for at least a while it looked like. Murder was certainly what the crazy bitch had in mind when she took the pistol out and let her husband have one in the brisket in the lobby.
"We're not used to this kind of event. On a Monday in the courthouse the routine is: we do the best we can, knowing it wont be enough. See if we can maybe make some sense out of what is basically an impossible situation every day, come right down to it, but especially impossible on Mondays. It looks like business as usual, and it is, but nothing actually makes any sense. The reason that it looks like it's making sense is that by now we're all so used to it being that way, chaos doesn't scare us anymore. We oughta be beside ourselves, frantic, but we're not; we're used to it. What wed all been doing there was coping, same as always, when she opened fire.
'"We never hear that sound here, that we've all just heard." This's what I told the investigating cop. And this's an example, what I mean, about things not making any sense in that place. We had all kinds of cops, State and local both, right there in the courtroom with us when we heard the shot. But for some reason I'm not clear on it seems this disqualifies them from taking charge of the investigation. Being there makes them witnesses, apparently an entirely different kind of being.
"It's like the cops've got union rules for this kind of situation.
Jurisdictional rules like the unions at the light company and the gas company and the phone company and the water department guys've got, who can open manholes, climb up poles, work on pipes and cables. Every crime's a new manhole to be opened. In this case, now I think of it, the crime that was committed was trying to open a hole in a man."
"Jesus," Hilliard said.
"Aw come on, I hadda hard day," Merrion said. "Apparently the rule is that nobody can have more'n one job on any given crime. Either you can be there, so you see it and hear it, in which case you are a witness; or else when the crime took place, you were not there; you got called to the scene. Then you respond, and investigate.
