He's on our side, my lawyer would remind me.

     “You want to know. Okay. You hear guys say they got shot, all they felt was a little sting, then a couple of minutes later they looked down and saw blood. That didn't happen to me. I knew exactly what was happening. There were two bastards standing in a hallway, no more than ten feet in front of me. I saw one of them bring the gun up, but I couldn't move fast enough.

     “I got this taste, awful, metallic. If you can imagine a mouthful of aluminum foil. I stood there, and I was watching. I was watching the gun and I was watching myself too, like I was curious to see what I would do. What I did was, I turned to the wall, like I'd give the bullet room to get by. All this happened a lot faster than I can tell it. I could see the pistol real well. I knew it was about a .38 caliber, and I remember wondering if he loaded .38 Specials or .357 magnum. It could have been either one.”

     “You noticed the caliber?”

     “Absolutely. If somebody points a gun at you, that's the most important thing in the world right then, what he's got in his hand, what's under the hammer. This was a Colt Python, nickle-plated, four-inch barrel. You spend enough time around guns, you notice these things. The Python is chambered for the .357 magnum but it'll handle .38 Specials, too. So I saw it and I wondered, is it the magnum or the .38 Special?”

     “Does it matter?”

     “Yeah. Oh yeah, it matters. And after it hit me, I knew it couldn't be the .38. Only the magnum would hit that hard.”

     “Like what?”

     “Like somebody smashed me in the ribs with a baseball bat. It knocked me down, I couldn't get up, I couldn't do anything. I heard the other one say, ‘Oh shit man, oh shit,’ and I thought it was pretty funny, because that's exactly