Larry shot a quick glance over his shoulder, inadvertently double-taking as he saw the door to the convenience-store refrigerator behind him fall to peices, as about sixteen beer cans emptied their contents onto the linoleum floor. Christ, he thought, that could've been me! His subconscious, unbidden as usual, pointed out that, as he only had one pair of pants, the fact that he had just pissed himself wasn't really all that great either.
He dove into another aisle as the obscenity-screaming store clerk unloaded another shot in his general direction. He wondered how it had come to this.
At twenty-two, he'd been out of work for approximately three months now. His father's medical bills had eaten up any potential inheritance, and he'd never met his mother, so his own savings were all that he had to fall back on. They'd run out about a week ago. He'd been kicked out of his LA apartment a week before that, and he'd soon decided that carrying his meager possessions about with him wasn't going to help his luck any, so he'd pawned everything but the clothes on his back and his dad's gold watch. He'd gotten about $250 for the lot. Pawn-shop owners, he'd decided, were in the business of extortion, and he'd wondered at the time, if this was the case, why none of them seemed even remotely successful.
Somehow, in the short course of a week living on the streets, he'd managed to fall in with the wrong crowd. In this case, the wrong crowd referred to an individual by the name of Eddie Gains. At first Larry thought that running into Eddie had been a miracle; a real, honest-to-goodness case of God stepping in and lending a hand. Now he was beginning to wonder if it wasn't actually the Devil at work. Eddie had been nothing but gracious, letting Larry sleep on the floor of his one room apartment, while he himself slept on the fold out couch. Admittedly, it wasn't the most comfortable thing in the world, sleeping on a guy's wooden floor, but there was a blanket invovled, and after spending six nights sleeping on a bench in the park, it was a dream come true.
During the day, Eddie ran errands of various mysterious natures, and Larry could never quite piece together exactly what he did for a living; any time it had come close to coming up in conversation Eddie had deftly steered the conversation in another direction. On his third day sleeping there, Eddie had asked Larry if he wanted to help him out on one of his errands, neglecting to specify exactly how he would be helping.
Larry had agreed mostly out of curiosity; he'd spent the previous two days trying to find any kind of work, since sleeping indoors had allowed him to be slightly more presentable for potential interviews, but it still hadn't been going well. They drove around for about four hours, stopping every once in a while, Eddie instructing Larry to stay in the car as he got out and had short, often heated conversations with more shady looking characters than Larry had seen in all of his twenty-two year life.
Finally, at around a quarter after six, they'd come to a Seven Eleven. Eddie had walked around the aisles for a few minutes, and Larry had simply assumed that he was looking for something to eat, so he went over to browse the magazine rack. Replacing the current issue of News Weekly on the rack, Larry walked over to join Eddie as he made his way over to the counter. The last thing he'd expected to see was Eddie pull a gun, and he was sure that he looked slightly more shocked than the shop owner as Eddie demanded all of the cash in the register. The clerk had stammered that he needed to get the key, and bent over to reach under the counter; it had exploded outward, with what Larry distantly recognized as the roar of a shotgun, and slammed Eddie back about six feet, before he landed in a heap on the ground.
Larry just stood there. A pool of red began to spread from Eddie's unmoving form, and still in shock, Larry stopped to wonder how many times he'd seen the same thing play out in movies; more than he could count, he'd decided and it never played out good for the guy in the position that he currently occupied. That was when the angry clerk turned the gun on him. He dove towards the back of the store as the gun had roared again. And that brought him to where he was now.
And currently, where he was was in the back of a Seven Eleven with the biggest shotgun he'd ever seen swinging in the direction of his head. Admittedly, he thought, the size could have something to do with the fact that it was currently pointed at his head.
Time slowed.
"Nobody points an effing gun at me, you son of a bitch!" screamed the clerk with a faint hispanic accent. He spat in Larry's direction. Too stunned and terrified to speak, all Larry could think was Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, over and over again. The room seemed to darken, and a man in a black robe stood over the clerk's shoulder. The shop owner's finger twitched on the trigger of the gun. The man in the robe smiled. Light glinted off the blade of a scythe. Larry's last thought was that he'd never particularly liked his name.
* * *
No comments:
Post a Comment