The Harder They Come Read Online Free PDF

been holding on to Carolee—protecting her—he might have slammed face-first into the seatback in front of him. As it was, he just managed to tuck his shoulder and soften the blow as the chassis recoiled and a rain of purses, cameras and water bottles spilled from the overhead racks and skittered across the floor, seeking equilibrium. The paramedic wasn’t as fortunate. All this time he’d been on the edge of his seat, leaning over the gunman and bracing him against the bumps and dips and wild looping turns, but he lost his grip at the final moment and the body rucked forward, sliding partially down the stairwell and shedding the rain slicker in the process.
    People looked to Sten, as if it was his responsibility, but he was having none of it. It was the paramedic’s problem now—he’d taken it upon himself, hadn’t he? He was the professional. Let him deal with it. For one stunned instant, people just stared, and then, cursing, the paramedic—short, square-shouldered, too heavy in the butt and with a face as round as the moon—sprang up out of his seat to wedge himself in the stairwell and prop up the man’s head, but he was clearly having trouble, the body having come to rest on one shoulder, canting the neck at a spastic angle. “Give me a hand here, will you, somebody?” he gasped, but nobody moved, or at least not expeditiously enough—they were old, all of them, old people—so he slid his hands in under the man’s arms, cradling his head as best he could, and began easing him down the steps.
    At this point, Bill—the other Bill, the one with hair—pushed himself up to help, ducking into the stairwell in a shuffling stoop to catch hold of the patient’s feet at the door, but at the last second they slipped from his grasp, flopping down on the hot pavement like fish on a stringer. The sound of it was nothing, barely audible, the small dull thump of dissociated flesh striking an unyielding surface, but it reverberated through the bus like a thunderclap. Sten could feel Carolee tense beside him. Nobody breathed.
    The paramedic—he’d seen worse—just seemed to shrug it off, dragging his patient up over the curb even as Bill, fumbling forward, managed to take hold of the abraded heels and lift them from the pavement. “Set him down,” they heard the paramedic say. “No, not in the dirt—right here, right on the walk.” Awkwardly, in a stoop that had him bent over double, Bill swung the man’s legs into alignment as the paramedic eased him down—waist, shoulders, one hand to protect the head, easy does it, and there was their collective burden, harmless enough now, laid out on his back like a sunbather on a glittering gum-spotted beach. Satisfied, the paramedic straightened up and threw a quick glance at the bus before hurrying up the walk and disappearing into the building, leaving Bill there to stand watch.
    That was the scene: the man called Bill, skinny, sunburned, his shoulders slumped and his waxen hair flattened to his head as if it had been dripped in place one hot strand at a time, standing there over the man who wasn’t breathing and whose throat was discolored under the point of his up-thrust chin—dark there, too dark, as if he’d decided to grow a goatee after all. Bill shifted in place, put his hands on his hips, dropped them. There was a smell of the sea, tepid and redolent of small deaths. Someone was revving a motorbike in the alley next to the clinic. A car rolled slowly up the street, its windshield molten under the sun.
    And then the paramedic (his name was Oscar, Sten would later learn, Oscar Ruiz, of Oakland, California, sixty-two years old and in his first month of retirement) emerged from the building, an attendant in pale green scrubs hustling along beside him, pushing a gurney. Everyone leaned forward to watch as the attendant bent to the motionless form, checking for vital signs—futilely, as far as Sten could see, though one woman kept insisting there was no reason