I kept walking, displaying all the street smarts I hadn’t shown Saturday night. I stayed at the edge of the sidewalk near the curb, keeping my distance from buildings and doorways. I looked left and right, and now and then I turned to see if anyone was moving up behind me. And I went on clutching the gun, my finger resting lightly alongside the trigger.

I crossed Broadway, walked on past Lincoln Center and O’Neal’s. I was on the dark block between Sixtieth and Sixty-first, across the street from Fordham, when I heard the car behind me and spun around. It was slanting across the wide avenue toward me and had cut off a cab. Maybe it was his brakes I heard, maybe that’s what made me turn.

I threw myself down on the pavement, rolled away from the street toward the buildings, came up with the .32 in my hand. The car was even with me now, its wheels straightened out. I’d thought it was going to vault the curb but it wasn’t. And the windows were open and someone was leaning out the rear window, looking my way, and he had something in his hand—

I had the gun pointed at him. I was prone, elbows braced in front of me, holding the gun in both hands. I had my finger on the trigger.

The man leaning out the window threw something, tossed it underhand. I thought, Jesus, a bomb, and I aimed at him and felt the trigger beneath my finger, felt it tremble like some little live thing, and I froze, I froze, I couldn’t pull the fucking trigger.

Time froze, too, like a stop-frame sequence in a film. Eight or ten yards from me a bottle struck the brick wall of a building and smashed. There was no explosion beyond the shattering of the glass. It was just an empty bottle.

And the car was just a car. I watched now as it went on careening south on Ninth Avenue, six kids in it, six drunken kids, and they might well kill somebody, they were drunk enough to do it, but when they did it would be an accident. They weren’t professional killers, hitmen dispatched to murder me. They were just a bunch of kids who’d had more to drink than they could handle. Maybe they’d cripple someone, maybe they’d total their car, maybe they’d make it home without bending a fender.

I got up slowly, looked at the gun in my hand. Thank God I hadn’t fired it. I could have shot them, I could have killed them.

God knows I’d wanted to. I’d tried to, thinking logically enough that they were trying to kill me.