Foster leaped to his feet and clawed at the pistol he had stuck behind his belt earlier. Jake’s vision cleared enough for him to see that. He reached for the gun at the small of his back, drawing faster than he ever had. Sometimes real life just played out like a book or movie.

Final shoot-out.

The shots crashed together. Jake felt the impact against his chest and went over backward. As he fell, he watched through eyes gone hazy again as Foster stumbled back and forth, trying to stop the blood that fountained from his bullet-torn throat. He couldn’t do it, of course, and after a second the gory stream slowed as his heart began slowing to its inevitable stop. He fell forward, and the blood began to form a slowly spreading pool under him.

Jake lay there, mostly numb. He was only vaguely aware of the tactically armored, heavily armed figures that began to swarm around him a few moments later. He heard some sort of erratic thumping, like the sound of distant drums, and wondered if that was his heartbeat.
Then that went away, and so did he.

[...]

“At least it’s not a damn statue,” Jake said as he looked at the plaque with his name on it mounted next to the entrance of the Burr Memorial Library.

Frank McRainey said, “Hey, your grandfather told me he thought about making them rename the whole library, but he decided the plaque was enough, since you didn’t die and all.”

“Yeah, staying alive fouled it all up, didn’t it?”

Jake still had a few twinges in his chest now and then from the bullet that had ripped through there, but it hadn’t hit anything too vital. The minor pains would go away in time. Probably.