*** No One Left To Burn ***
Chapter 1
12
I gave the cabbie the address of the Presidio, which is the apartment
complex I call home, and he acknowledged with a sleepy yawn and a nod.
Traffic was slow moving, but I didn’t care.
The intermittent rain had become a steady, silent, misty drizzle.
I was almost put to sleep by the narcotic effect of the swish, swash,
swish sounds made by the windshield wiper blades as they scraped away a clear
spot on either side of the driver’s line of vision.
Science can get us safely to the moon and back but can’t develop a
wiper blade that will last more than three months.
When we turned off
We continued on another eight blocks, before we came to the block in
which I live. Then, I almost
crapped. I slumped down in the seat
and yelled to the driver, “don’t stop! For
Chrissake don’t stop!”
“What? But you said...”
“Never mind what I said,” I responded.
“Don’t stop! Don’t even
slow this sumbitch down!” I
slumped a little more until I was almost lying on the rear floor of the cab.
As we passed I raised my head just enough to look at the big Cadillac
parked at the curb. I could see two
occupants inside who were staring intently at my apartment building a half a
block down the street. The same car they’d used earlier. How stupid.
I told the driver to keep cruising. I
wasn’t in the proper physical and mental shape to mess with these two guys
right now. And yet, at the same
time, it made me mad as hell to be denied access to my own home.
That had to be some kind of violation of my civil rights, I thought.
Not to mention the fact these goons had demonstrated a propensity to do
me severe bodily harm in a most permanent fashion.
The more I thought about it, the more pissed I got.
The more pissed I got, the more my physical and mental condition
improved.
We went straight ahead two blocks, and I directed the cabbie to make a
right turn. After one block I had
him turn right again. We came back
the two blocks and I told the driver to turn right again.
The cabbie started mumbling something that sounded like “what the shit
are we doing?”
“Take it easy, pal,” I told him.
“You stick with me on this and you’re in for one hell of a tip.”
I had him stop about one hundred feet from the corner of
I stayed close to the house on the corner where there was considerable
cover offered by bushes and trees. When
I reached the intersection I turned right toward the Cadillac and at the same
time slipped my .38 Colt from its holster. I
moved as fast as I could without tripping in the darkness.
I was almost even with the Cadillac from behind, but still twenty or so
feet to the right hidden by cover provided by several oleander bushes.
Then, just as if we’d rehearsed it, the cab came around the corner,
slowly at first with lights off. Once
on Robert E. Lee the lights came on and the accelerator went down.
The cab reached enough speed, so when it braked to a stop in front of the
apartment building, it did so with a loud screeching sound.
The two brutes in the Cadillac had been looking straight to the front so
intently that they never saw the cab until it slammed to a stop in front of
them. Their attention was now locked
onto the cab as I’d hoped it would be. Who
was going to get out?
I could see movement in the car as I started trotting toward it, half
stooped over. The window was
down on the passenger side, and as I reached the car I squatted down and thrust
my hand through the open window.
The first inkling the stooges had that I was even there was when I jammed
the muzzle of the Colt into the guy’s right ear.
“Don’t move,” I whispered.
The driver started to say something, but I cut him off.
“Shut the fuck up! Don’t
do anything, don’t say anything, and don’t move a goddamned muscle.”
There was dead silence in the car. I
couldn’t even hear if they were breathing.
I was just about to open the car door, when the one with the gun growing
out of his ear cut a fart.
I’d heard that would sometimes happen if a person were scared enough.
I pushed a little harder on the gun and said, “I told you not to do
anything, and that includes shitting your pants.
Now you’re going to have to sit in it while we have a little chat.”
The driver was starting to fidget as I opened the car door.
He was startled by the sudden glare inside the car when the overhead dome
light and the door side lights flashed on. I
was similarly startled at the sight of the .45 automatic he was in the process
of raising toward me.
There was a rapid three-way exchange of expletive dialogue:
Driver: “You
motherfucker.”
Me: “You
cocksucker.”
Guy with gun in his ear: “What the fuck?”
I jerked the car door full open and grabbed the guy in front of me by a
fistful of his greasy ponytail. I
pulled hard and at the same time ducked as low as possible, lying prone on the
ground with my face in the grass.
I looked up when my grasp lost its hold, and my fingers slid free from
his hair. His seatbelt held him
firmly in place.
“Shit!”
I rolled toward the rear of the car just as two shots rang out from the
inside. The guy with the sore scalp
held the forty-five now, and he had just put two slugs in the grass where I’d
been lying. As he swung the gun
around toward me again, I heard the Cadillac engine start up, and there was more
pungent dialogue:
“Son of a bitch!”
“I’ll blow your fucking balls off!”
“You rotten prick!”
“Fuck you!”
He almost had the gun leveled at me when I brought my own up firing.
I jerked the trigger rather than squeezing it, causing loss of some of my
accuracy. I knew better.
I got off five quick shots. The
first hit the ground in front of the car door.
The second blew out the door speaker.
The third, fourth and fifth hit my target in the chest, neck and between
his wide-eyed peepers.
I crawled to the right so that I could see into the car through the open
door, but the car was already moving forward.
By the time I got my legs under me, all I could see was smoke from the
spinning tires as the Cadillac rapidly accelerated down Robert E. Lee. The right
door was propped open by the limp, ponderous body hanging out. Arm flopping,
head bobbing and ponytail dragging.
The cab driver was out of his cab and on the dead run to where I was
standing before the Cadillac reached the corner.
He stopped short, somewhat winded, and was looking around with animated
movements, like he expected someone to jump out of the bushes at us.
“She - it,” he said, making it a two syllable word.
“Did you see that guy hanging out of that car door?
What the hell happened to him?”
“I shot him in the fucking head.”
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