It would take the investigators some time to assemble the shot, frame by frame, like a machine from scattered parts, and when they had assembled it they would use words like grazing and trajectory and remarkably fortunate, which are the words professionals use when they mean miracle and are not allowed to say so on a form.
Here is what the machine looked like when it was put together.
Ray Maddox drew from inside his jacket, raising the pistol one-handed, already turning it toward the movement his eye had caught — toward Everett, who was crossing toward him, and also, in Ray's rehearsed accounting, toward whatever angle made the best story. Everett reached him a half-step before the gun came level. There is a geometry to such things, as merciless as the arithmetic of a rainy curve outside Louisville: mass, angle, a hand knocked upward at the wrist, a finger's reflexive contraction at exactly the wrong instant for everyone. The shot went off as the two men came together, and the bullet — aimed at a story, derailed by a shoulder and a wrist and a big desperate hand — found the only thing left in its path, which was the outside of Everett Knox's hip, and tore through muscle along the bone like a plow through a field, and exited, and spent itself in the concrete of the forecourt, where it left a small bright scar the plaza would keep for years and point out to travelers.
An inch. The surgeon would say later: less than an inch, in the other direction, and we are having a different conversation. An inch the other way and the femur, an inch the other way and the artery with the man's whole life in it. The bullet took meat and blood and momentum, and it put him down, because bullets do that arithmetic too — but it did not take anything that could not be sewn, drained, exercised, or endured. It is important to be plain about this, the way Everett himself would later be plain about it, lying in a hospital bed with his leg in the air: the shot should have finished the story Ray came to tell. It was deflected by the width of a man's thumb by the plain fact of Everett moving the right way at the right tenth of a second. People who believe in nothing would call it luck. People who believe in something else would note that a five-year-old had been warned, by name and by day, to make a man remember how to be a bear — and that bears, when the moment comes, move toward.
What the plaza did next deserves its own accounting, because the plaza had spent the whole afternoon being judged — by itself, mostly — as a crowd of people who gave a frightening man a wide berth and watched a small girl walk up to him alone. The plaza redeemed itself in ninety seconds. The trucker who kicked the gun had Ray's arms pinned before the echo finished. The old man from the ice machine called 911 with a flip phone and gave the dispatcher the exit number without being asked, twice, in the clear voice of a man who had done it before. The minivan mother had Junie scooped up and behind the shelter of her own body before Claire's scream had ended, and was holding the child so that she could see over a protective shoulder — because the mother had decided, instantly and correctly, that this particular child would need to see — while keeping her own bulk between Junie and any second chapter the afternoon might try to start.
And Ray Maddox, flat on the concrete with a trucker's knee in his back and his long-planned afternoon in ruins around him, laughed and bled and rehearsed his sentence — he attacked me, the monster attacked me — to an audience that had watched every second of it and was no longer, any of them, willing to pretend they had not.
Sirens arrived the way they do, from far off and then all at once.
The scar stayed. The plaza management discussed resurfacing that winter and decided, in the end, to leave it — an employee named Denny took to telling new hires it was the plaza's medal, and more than one traveler, hearing the story, went out of their way to park at Pump Seven and stand a moment in the spot. Places keep what people cannot. The bright gouge in the concrete kept the exact shape of the afternoon's turning: the place where a bullet meant for a story hit the ground instead.
But the center of the scene was not Ray, and it was not the gun under the car, and it was not the shouting. The center of the scene, to which every witness's eyes kept returning the way a compass needle returns, was the big man on his back by Pump Seven with his hand pressed to his own hip and his blood coming steadily through his fingers — who was, at that moment, doing the most Everett Knox thing it was possible to do. He was trying to sit up, so as not to frighten the child.