“He won’t. His eyes’ll pop out when he sees this.”
I looked at the kitchen clock. It was going on nine now.
“I guess we could drive over there.”
“It may be a long night,” Neil said.
“I know.”
“But I guess we don’t have a hell of a lot of choice, do we?”
As we’d done the last time we’d been here, we split up the duties. I took the backyard, Neil the apartment door. We’d waited until midnight. The rap music had died by now. Babies cried and mothers screamed; couples fought. TV screens flickered in dark windows.
I went up the fire escape slowly and carefully We’d talked about bringing guns, then decided against it. We weren’t exactly marksmen, and if a cop stopped us for some reason, we could be arrested for carrying unlicensed firearms. All I carried was a flashlight in my back pocket.
As I grabbed the rungs of the ladder, powdery rust dusted my hands. I was chilly with sweat. My bowels felt sick. I was scared. I just wanted it to be over with. I wanted him to say yes, he’d take the money, and then that would be the end of it.
The stucco veranda was filled with discarded toys — a tricycle, innumerable games, a space helmet, a Wiffle bat and ball. The floor was crunchy with dried animal feces. At least, I hoped the feces belonged to animals and not human children.
The door between veranda and apartment was open. Fingers of moonlight revealed an overstuffed couch and chair and a floor covered with the debris of fast food, McDonald’s sacks, Pizza Hut wrappers and cardboards, Arby’s wrappers, and what seemed to be five or six dozen empty beer cans. Far toward the hall that led to the front door, I saw l our red eyes watching me, a pair of curious rats.
I stood still and listened. Nothing. No sign of life. I went inside. Tiptoeing.
I went to the front door and let Neil in. There in the murky light of the hallway, he made a face. The smell was pretty bad.
Over the next ten minutes, we searched the apartment. And found nobody.
“We could wait here for him,” I said.
“No way.”
“The smell?”
“The smell, the rats. God. Don’t you just feel unclean?”
“Yeah, guess I do.”
“There’s an empty garage about halfway down the alley. We’d have a good view of the back of this building.”
“Sounds pretty good.”
“Sounds better than this place, anyway.”
This time, we both went out the front door and down the stairway. Now the smells were getting to me as they’d earlier gotten to Neil. Unclean. He was right.
We got in Neil’s Buick, drove down the alley that ran along the west side of the apartment house, backed up to the dark garage, and whipped inside.
“There’s a sack in back,” Neil said. “It’s on your side.”
“A sack?”
“Brewskis. Quart for you, quart for me.”
“That’s how my old man used to drink them,” I said. I was the only blue-collar member of the poker club. “Get off work at the plant and stop by and pick up two quart bottles of Hamms. Never missed.”
“Sometimes I wish I would’ve been born into the working class,” Neil said.
I was the blue-collar guy, and Neil was the dreamer, always inventing alternative realities for himself.
“No, you don’t,” I said, leaning over the seat and picking up the sack damp from the quart bottles. “You had a damned nice life in Boston.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t learn anything. You know I was eighteen before I learned about cunnilingus?”
“Talk about cultural deprivation,” I said.
“Well, every girl I went out with probably looks back on me as a pretty lame lover. They went down on me, but I never went down on them. How old were you when you learned about cunnilingus?”
“Maybe thirteen.”
“See?”
“I learned about it, but I didn’t do anything about it.”
“I was twenty years old before I lost my cherry,” Neil said.
“I was seventeen.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit what? I was seventeen.”
“In sociology, they always taught us that blue-collar kids lost their virginity a lot earlier than white-collar kids.”
“That’s the trouble with sociology. It tries to particularize from generalities.”
“Huh?” He grinned. “Yeah, I always thought sociology was full of shit, too, actually. But you were really seventeen?”
“I was really seventeen.”
I wish I could tell you that I knew what it was right away, the missile that hit the windshield and shattered and starred it, and then kept right on tearing through the car until the back window was also shattered and starred.
But all I knew was that Neil was screaming and I was screaming and my quart bottle of Miller’s was spilling all over my crotch as I tried to hunch down behind the dashboard. It was a tight fit because Neil was trying to hunch down behind the steering wheel.
The second time, I knew what was going on: somebody was shooting at us. Given the trajectory of the bullet, he had to be right in front of us, probably behind the two Dumpsters that sat on the other side of the alley.
“Can you keep down and drive this son of a bitch at the same time?”
“I can try,” Neil said.
“If we sit here much longer, he’s going to figure out we don’t have guns. Then he’s gonna come for us for sure.”
Neil leaned over and turned on the ignition. “I’m going to turn left when we get out of here.”
“Fine. Just get moving.”
“Hold on.”
What he did was kind of slump over the bottom half of the wheel, just enough so he could sneak a peek at where the car was headed.
There were no more shots.
All I could hear was the smooth-running Buick motor.
He eased out of the garage, ducking down all the time.
When he got a chance, he bore left.
He kept the lights off.
Through the bullet hole in the windshield, I could see an inch or so of starry sky.
It was a long alley, and we must have gone a quarter block before he said, “I’m going to sit up. I think we lost him.”
“So do I.”
“Look at the frigging windshield.”
Not only was the windshield a mess, the car reeked of spilled beer.
“You think I should turn on the headlights?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’re safe now.”
We were still crawling at maybe ten miles per hour when he pulled the headlights on.
That’s when we saw him, silver of eye, dark of hair, crouching in the middle of the alley waiting for us. He was a good fifty yards ahead of us, but we were still within range.
There was no place we could turn around.
He fired.
This bullet shattered whatever had been left untouched of the windshield. Neil slammed on the brakes.
Then he fired a second time.
By now, both Neil and I were screaming and cursing again.
A third bullet.
“Run him over!” I yelled, ducking behind the dashboard.
“What?” Neil yelled back.
“Floor it!”
He floored it. He wasn’t even sitting up straight. We might have gone careening into one of the garages or Dumpsters. But somehow the Buick stayed in the alley. And very soon it was traveling eighty-five miles per hour. I watched the speedometer peg it.
More shots, a lot of them now, side windows shattering, bullets ripping into fender and hood and top.
I didn’t see us hit him, but I felt us hit him, the car traveling that fast, the creep so intent on killing us he hadn’t bothered to get out of the way in time.
The front of the car picked him up and hurled him into a garage near the head of the alley.
We both sat up, watched as his entire body was broken against the edge of the garage, and he then fell smashed and unmoving to the grass.
“Kill the lights,” I said.
“What?”
“Kill the lights, and let’s go look at him.”
Neil punched off the headlights.
We left the car and ran over to him.
A white rib stuck bloody and brazen from his side. Blood poured from his ears, nose, mouth. One leg had been crushed and also showed white bone. His arms had been broken, too.