I use the sheet to wipe the blood off the gun. I give DiGrassi’s lifeless body one last look before leaving. He should’ve been grateful to me for taking him out of his misery the way I did instead of all his bitching and moaning, but I don’t want to let a last few minutes color my memory of him. Jenny’s pregnant with our third kid. She’s convinced it’s going to be a boy. I play around with the thought of Vincent March for a name, but decide against it.
DiGrassi’s wife and kids are out of the house, which makes things easier for me. With the house empty, I think about taking a shower to clean the smell of death off me, but I decide that can wait until I go to the YMCA. Besides, they have a steam room there. I let myself out the back door, same way I came in.
chapter 18
present
It was the next day when I spotted two punks working themselves up to rob a liquor store. At the time I was walking to the library and they were standing across the street, both in their early twenties, their heads shaved and their bodies thin to the point of emaciated. They were dressed the same, wearing loose-fitting khaki pants and the type of faded dungaree jackets that you used to be able to buy at army surplus stores. The one that I could see more clearly looked like he was having a tough time standing still, his face folded into a scowl and his eyes fixed in a death stare. I’d been around enough crystal meth users in prison to see immediately that these two were on the stuff. In my younger days I’d also robbed enough stores to know what they were planning even without seeing the bulge a gun made tucked inside one of their waistbands. I knew even before I saw them pull their ski masks out.
I wanted to keep walking. The last thing I wanted to do was get involved, but I stopped in my tracks, paralyzed. I could see how wired these two punks were, and all I could imagine was how trigger-happy they were going to be once inside the liquor store. The people they were going to kill in there would be more blood on my hands. Reluctantly, I found myself jogging across the street, then tapping the one with the gun on the shoulder and asking him if he had a smoke.
He turned to face me, his ski mask pulled on three quarters of the way. His eyes empty as he faced me, his exposed mouth ugly and his body twitching.
“What the fuck you want?” he demanded, his voice just as tight and wired as I had imagined.
“You got a cigarette?” I asked again.
“Yeah, I got something for you to suck on, you stupid fuck.”
He was taking the. 38 from his waistband. There was no doubt from the violence shining in his eyes that he was planning to shoot me. I stepped in quickly, and with my left hand took the gun away from him while at the same time hitting him in the throat with my right. The punch left him making funny noises as he struggled to breathe. Without giving him a chance to recover, I sent him hard on his ass on the concrete sidewalk, then kicked him in the head hard enough to bounce it off the concrete and put him out.
His buddy turned around then. He was still pulling his ski mask on, and I could see the dazed look in his eyes as he first stared at me and then his buddy on the ground. Slowly comprehension worked its way in.
“You dumb motherfucker,” he near spat at me.
It turned out he also had a gun in his waistband, but he was too hyped up to see that I was holding a. 38 on him. He started to pull his weapon out. I could’ve blown him to hell, but instead I flipped the. 38 in my hand and rapped him in the jaw with the gun butt. The blow sent him to his knees and his own gun tumbling out of his hand. I picked it up and dropped it in my jacket pocket. He looked up at me, blood coming out pretty good from his mouth, a thick purple bruise already showing on his jaw. His eyes were big as he noticed for the first time that I was holding a. 38 on him. One of his pupils looked dilated, showing that he had concussion. A little known fact: a blow to the jaw can cause a concussion.
“Get on your stomach,” I ordered.
“Hey, man, you don’t have to do this.”
I gestured with the gun that he’d better listen to me.
“If you quit acting like a dumb fuck, we can give you a cut,” he said.
It was laughable. His buddy out cold, him bleeding and with concussion, and he was still thinking of robbing the liquor store. I shook my head at him, and something about my expression made him listen to me and get down on his stomach.
A couple of people came out of the liquor store curious about the commotion. Their faces blanched when they saw the two punks bleeding as they lay on the sidewalk, and me holding a gun on them.
“Can someone please call the police?” I asked them.
Somebody already had. The next moment I heard the sirens approaching, then tires screeching. Without turning to look I knew that two cruisers had pulled to a stop behind me. I didn’t want them coming out with their weapons drawn and me holding a gun on these two. I lowered the gun I was holding and placed it by my feet, then raised my hands so they were visible. The punk on his stomach watched this, and I caught the calculating look in his eyes as he tried to decide whether it was worth making a run for it, or maybe even a dive for the gun. I heard the doors to the police cruisers being thrown open, then one of the cops yelling for nobody to move.
“Officer, I have another gun in my jacket pocket,” I yelled to them. “I took both guns off these two meth heads right before they were about to rob this liquor store.”
“That old man’s a psycho,” the punk on his stomach tried arguing, his voice barely a rasp. “We weren’t going to rob nothing, and I ain’t on any meth. This psycho attacked me and my brother for nothing. And those guns are his. I never saw them before.”
Maybe what he was saying would’ve carried more weight if he and his brother weren’t wearing ski masks. I glanced over my shoulder and saw one of the cops giving the punk a glazed-eyed stare. This cop noticed me looking at him and told me to stand where I was, then walked over to me so he could take the gun from my jacket pocket and pick up the one by my feet.
“Any of you see what happened?” this cop asked the bystanders. He was a good ten years younger than me, but still looked older than the other cops at the scene, with gray hair cut close to the scalp and a fatigued expression on his long face. He reminded me of an older version of Roy Scheider from The French Connection.
The bystanders shook their heads in response to his question. One of them told him that they came out of the store after they heard a fight outside, but didn’t see anything except me holding a gun on the two youths.
This older cop let out a tired sigh. He told me I could lower my hands, and asked me to tell him how I knew these two were planning on robbing the store. The would-be robber lying on his stomach tried arguing that they weren’t planning on robbing anyone. Another cop who was in the process of handcuffing him pushed his face into the sidewalk to shut him up.
“The two of them looked suspicious standing outside the liquor store,” I told the older cop. “When I saw a gun sticking out of that one’s waistband” – I nodded towards the one who was out cold – “and then saw them both putting on ski masks, I knew what they were going to do, and knew that if I didn’t stop them, as hyped up as they were acting, they were going to be killing people in there.”
The cop I was telling this to stared at me incredulously. “What did you do to stop them?” he asked. I told him and his incredulity only intensified. He looked as if I were telling him a joke and he was waiting for the punchline. One of the other cops recognized me then. I could see it in the shift in his expression. He pulled this older cop aside and said something to him. I was warned then to make sure to keep my hands visible, and I watched as the cop I’d been talking to went back to his squad car and got on his two-way. When he came back his attitude towards me had changed.