"You! Up against the fucking wall right now or else I swear to fucking god I'll shoot you in your motherfucking face! Now move, asshole!" He meant every word, for he'd rehearsed what he'd say for two weeks before this moment, as he held up the convenience store. While he could use the money that he'd get from odd jobs such as this, in the back of his mind he wished someone sometime would just once, just fucking once, give him a moment of hesitation, a touch of attitude, and he'd make good on his threats. But other than that little quirk, he considered himself a somewhat benevolent soul, a Robin Hood of the new aeon, albeit a bit more involved in the game than he'd let himself believe.
He thought his clearest thoughts during moments like these; in command of the situation, watching the door for any stray customers, listening for the pig sirens, forcing his captors to obey his every fucking word.
Philosophically, he didn't see the old Korean woman's frightened face contorting in confused tears at the end of his black barrel; it was every person who ever tried to tell him that something wasn't his. What lay in the cash register was every childhood dream ever withheld from him.
"Please don't shoot, please don't take me from my family! Who will take care of them please don't hurt me mister-"
"Shut up, bitch! I said against that goddamn wall! Get away from the register! Hands where I can see 'em!" He moved quickly behind the counter, giving the old woman a hard shove out of his way, into a cardboard display of cigarette premiums. Packs flew everywhere.
He hit the no sale button on the register. The drawer slid out, and bumped lightly into his hip. One hand aimed the gun on the woman, still crumpled on the floor. The other one pulled bills out of their respective slots, twenties and tens, then the fives and singles. They all disappeared into the deep pockets on his army coat. Where's all the fifties and hundreds? He lifted the drawer up roughly, spilling change, and spied one of each bill. They soon found themselves shoved into the front pocket of his jeans.
"All right, where's the fucking drop safe?" He knew they had one, and because of the Labor Day weekend, they hadn't emptied it to make a deposit yet. He'd been watching the place for a while, occasionally going in to buy cigarettes and beer, always checking the place out, trying to pick up on any ways he could make his way in. He also knew that the old lady was the only person who worked the afternoon shift who knew the combination of the safe. She pointed down, where nestled into the floor was the face of the safe, raised up only slightly, concealed from the other side of the counter by the counter itself, finding itself by the cashier's feet.
"Now, crack it open. Hurry the fuck up." She crawled over, constantly watching him, watching the gun, as she spun the dial, one hand supporting herself on the top of the counter. He'd been too busy watching her crack the combination to see her press the silent alarm, camouflaged into the linoleum, recessed only slightly into the counter's bottom. Too late to stop her, he realized. The cops would be here quick.
"Oh fuck," he muttered in a panicked tone, "you are so dead." He pushed the big black gun into her face, taunted and teased her with the long barrel. "I'm gonna stick this down your fucking throat and pull the trigger! The pigs are gonna have to scrape your brains off the fucking floor!" Kill her and get out, man. Shoot her in the face, then get the fuck out.
BAM!!!
He breathed a deep gulp in, or at least tried to; his lungs felt heavy with death. He thought he was the one with the fucking piece. He looked down to make sure he didn't shoot himself. Nope, he was shot through the back, the bullet exiting his stomach. Didn't count on the old guy in the goddamn bathroom. Must've been her husband or her brother or some shit. He looked up at the figure standing above him, smoke dripping from the end of his pistol just like the goddamn movies.
"Think you can fucking steal from me, you piece of shit? I wipe my fucking ass with trash like you." He glanced over at the woman. "Hey, are you OK? Did this piece of shit hurt you?" He reared his foot back, ready to kick the perpetrator, but he grabbed the supporting ankle and pulled the old man down onto the floor with him. The two men wrestled at each other, trying to gun their guns into a firing position, but with a sudden burst of energy the thief knocked the old man's weapon away and pressed his own to the Korean's temple. This time he did the shooting; at such close range, the old man's face disappeared with a red explosion. Pieces of his skull and meat splattered the screaming woman.
Gotta get out of here now, why ain't the cops here yet? He shoved his gun into his waistband and ran for the door. He had left his Camaro running outside in the parking lot. He found it hard to make his way towards the car, even harder to breathe. He fought his way there, and swung open the door, then fell into his seat. He squealed his tires getting out of there, as fast as he could.
He made it about three blocks away when he heard the sirens. Please God, don't let them catch me, he prayed. And please don't let me die. No one was supposed to get killed. He'd done four robberies before, and they all went off without a hitch, no one hurt, nothing but a pocket full of money. Brady couldn't believe all of this was happening.
The steering wheel became harder and harder to hold on to. He felt an acute awareness growing inside him, one that told him that he was losing consciousness fast as the blood poured out of his belly. Where the fuck am I going? Once familiar streets soon lost their basis in his memory. He swerved wildly over the yellow line. The other cars did all they could to avoid running into him head-on. He didn't even notice them anymore. All he could think about was the perfume his mother wore when he was a kid, before she went away. His head bounced off of the steering wheel, then came to rest there.
"Holy shit!" the man in the pickup yelled as he saw the Camaro coming straight for him, in his lane a second before the collision. He braced his arms behind the death-grip he had on the wheel. The cars collapsed into each other, becoming one giant hybrid of crumpled metal and human parts sticking out at odd intervals.
To hear the sound of two cars colliding is to hear the voice of your own personal death, calling to bring you home.
Eternal seconds allowed the machinery to cease their trajectories, rebounding back from the force they'd just met, to twist and mangle the two individuals inside. All had been destroyed, left in an unrecognizable mess. The man in the pickup went through his windshield, laid out face down upon his accordion hood. His end came quick; he felt little else but surprise. Brady wasn't so fortunate; the crash had awakened him from the coma he'd slipped into from his gunshot wound. He still wasn't sure where he was; he thought he'd just woke up from one crazy night of drinking and drugging. Then he remembered everything that had happened, up to this point.
The pedestrians who quickly gathered about the accident scene all heard the tortured screams of the man trapped inside the twisted bulk of the Camaro.
"Oh my god, somebody's still alive in there!" cried a young mother, cradling her toddler's face to her bosom to prevent him from seeing the carnage. "Somebody call an ambulance!" A civic-minded executive who happened to be passing by dutifully dialed up 911 on his cell phone.
"Oh fucking Christ," Brady moaned in a lower pitch, his lungs not holding as much air as before to project his pain. The steering column crushed his rib cage with such a strong force behind it that it blew his organs out his sides, from the large rips in his torso where the raw meat dangled from beyond-repair ribs jutting out from asymmetrical angles. He still held on to his life, if only by a thin silver thread. The only thing he still felt was white heat pain, pain that stood upon the edge of the world. He looked down at his mutilated body, all the broken pieces, and refused to believe it was he. It almost made it easier to deal with the agony that racked him.
Sarge came rolling up to the accident in his cruiser. He could see the wreck from the six car-lengths back. "Goddamnit," he muttered, surveying the mess in front of him. He had been responding to the convenience store robbery call. He didn't feel like rushing there to the scene, didn't really want to have to write up a report, so he took a longer way around, and look at what his trouble brought him. The fleck of cop intuition inside him told him that the black Camaro contained the perpetrator. Looked like he'd have to write up a report after all. "Godamnit," he said again.
"I found our cowboy," he said over his CB. "He's fucked himself royally out here on Seventh and Wilmington. Send the meat wagon, willya, tell 'em to bring a squeegee to scrape these bastards off the pavement." He hung up the mouthpiece with a chuckle.
("Screw them sons of whores," Sarge used to tell his wife, "if they've fucked themselves over, at least I can have a sense of humor about it all." She was horrified by sentiments like these but never really shared her opinions or feelings with the rotund cop she'd been married to. For twenty-three years, she felt like a prisoner he was perpetually interrogating, and only a handful of Tylenol PM's on a desperate, beating-filled night kept her from her well-deserved freedom. He'd made more than a few off-colour jokes at her funeral.)
Sarge ducked his head through the shattered driver's side window of the Camaro. "You're still alive, huh bub?" he asked the broken man who was virtually impaled by his steering wheel. "Now, why in the hell would you have done something like this?" When he saw the question didn't register with the quivering man, his voice reduced to a whisper. "How much did you make off with, huh? A few hundred? Maybe less, by the looks of you.
You are one sorry son of a whore, you know that, don't ya?" Sarge saw a few bills sticking out of his pocket. "What do we have here, the big till?" He pulled out three twenties. "This is my service fee, you understand? I'm not gonna sit here and stare at your fucked-up face for free. Besides, you ain't gonna be around much longer, who you gonna tell?" He laughed again, sliding the money into his pocket. Sarge ran his short fat fingers along the crumpled metal, admiring all the pain and suffering that such a brief moment had caused. Glad to see the ambulance ain't in no hurry. Might as well head to the station. A crowd of on-lookers examined the scene. "Don't any of you people have someplace to go? Get the hell outta here, ya goddamn rubberneckers. Have some respect for the fucking dead." Sarge eased his ass into the cruiser, headed up Lexington towards the station. He thought about how his hemorrhoids were getting worse, and he'd have to go back to the doctor soon. He tunelessly whistled a song he'd heard on the radio that morning.
