Mark stares after him, the gunshot ringing in his ears. He is not the Cowardly Lion. He is no longer Mark David Chapman or ordinary by any human measures. Now he is something other—something transcendent. Eternal. Now, in this moment, he has become the world’s most famous celebrity.

Finally, I am known.

Through history and time.

The doorman, Jose Perdomo, rushes him and grabs his arm—the one holding the gun. The .38 falls from Mark’s hand. The night watchman kicks it away.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” Jose asks incredulously, tears streaming down his face. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

“I’ve just shot John Lennon.”

“Just get outta here, man. Just get outta here!”

Mark cocks his head to the side, confused. “But where will I go?”

Jose doesn’t stick around to answer.

Mark pulls out his paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye from his back pocket and starts to read.

Chapter 62

Chapter 62

It’s just a shot away.

—“Gimme Shelter”

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, NYPD officer Peter Cullen and his partner, Steve Spiro, are on night patrol. They’re parked at the corner of Broadway and 72nd Street when their police radio squawks.

“Shots fired, 1 West 72nd Street.”

Cullen and Spiro know the address—the Dakota.

With lights flashing and siren wailing, they race east, toward Central Park.

*  *  *

From a terrace twenty-two stories above street level, a young girl and her parents are watching and listening. “I heard the gunshots, the first I’d ever heard. They sounded so much different than on TV. Crack-crack-crack…It was the first time I saw my parents both cry at the same time.”

*  *  *

At the Langham, 135 Central Park West, James Taylor hears gunfire.

He leans his head out the window and looks toward the building across the street to the south. He’s pretty sure the gunfire came from the Dakota.

*  *  *

Spiro and Cullen draw their weapons and slowly pass through the archway of the Dakota.

Cullen sees a familiar face. It’s Jose Perdomo.

“Jose, what the hell is going on here?”

The security guard points to a doughy man in an overcoat with his nose stuck in a paperback book.

“He shot John Lennon!” Perdomo cries through trembling lips.

Cullen motions his partner to stay with the suspect. Steve Spiro points his gun at the man, who throws his hands up in surrender.

“Don’t hurt me,” he pleads. “I’m unarmed. Please don’t let anyone hurt me.”

Spiro grabs the suspect and faces him against the wall, kicking his feet apart.

Cullen enters the Dakota guardhouse, where John is lying facedown. Porter Jay Hastings is ready to apply a tourniquet to John’s wounds, but there is little more he can do than remove John’s glasses and cover him with his uniform coat.