• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 414 0

storefronts on either side as well as across the street, the nearest phone would be in the liquor store around the corner. By then it would be too late. He could run around back onto the loading dock to use the meat-room phone, then he remembered that door was always locked. Two more aisles to go and Thurman would be in sight of the gunman. Serena set the cash boxes on the counter. She started to back away, but the gunman spun around, screaming and gesturing with the gun. With each demand he sprang forward on one foot, then lurched back again to scream at June. Terrified, Serena seized a handful of plastic bags, most drifting to her feet as she tried to get one inside the other. She dumped the money from the drawers into the bag. June began to cry. A car was coming down the street. Gordon ran toward it waving his arms, but the horrified woman at the wheel veered into the oncoming lane, then sped away. The Market door flew open and the man ran outside. Gordon watched from the road with dirty water gushing past his feet.

“He’s got a gun! He just held us up!” Serena screamed from the doorway as the man sprinted down Nash Street, hugging the bag to his chest.

Gordon’s heavy, sodden sneakers splashed down the street, but once around the corner, the thief disappeared into the foggy rain. When he got back, three cruisers were in front of the Market, parked at the chaotic angles in which they’d arrived. Questioning Thurman was futile, though both women agreed that his sudden caterwaul of song had triggered the thief’s flight. Serena couldn’t stop shaking. June was hyperventilating. Her son was on his way to bring her home. This was the first holdup in which they’d actually seen a gun. Befuddled by pain and medication, Neil hunched in the front window, wearing a Red Sox cap and sunglasses over his light-sensitive eyes. “I was asleep,” he told silver-haired Detective Warren, who with his forearm kept shifting his belly into place. He asked the women to describe the thief’s voice. Shaky, they agreed. No accent. Not deep or high or soft.

“Scared,” Serena said, hugging herself. “Like if we didn’t do what he said, he’d just shoot. Like he couldn’t even help it.”

“So where were you again?” Detective Warren hefted his girth toward Gordon.

“Out there. Getting the carts.”

“For how long?”

“Five minutes. I’m not sure.”

“Five minutes. That’s a long time to be out in that.”

“Just about all the carts were out there. Some were even down the street.”

“So when you finally got them all collected, you were right there by the window.”

“Yes,” he said, the details already blurring through the curtain of jailhouse blindness.

“So you must’ve seen something. You were standing right by the window there.”

“I wasn’t really looking. I was trying to get the carts lined up.” June stared at him.

“So you didn’t see anything until when?”

“He ran out the door and Serena yelled. That’s when I started chasing him.”

Warren’s eyes were cold on his. The detective wet his thumb and flipped a page in his blue spiral pad. “According to Serena Rimsky, you were standing in the middle of the road waving your arms when she yelled at you.”

“Maybe. I might have been. I don’t know. I’m not sure.” Admit it, he thought as the detective stared at him. Tell him the truth, that you weren’t thinking straight. That once again at the crucial moment you panicked.

You don’t know anything, kid, remember that.You were there, that’s all—you were just there: Jackie McBride’s first rule for survival.

“How long you been out?” the detective asked in a low voice.

“Since May first.”

“You don’t remember me, do you.”

“I don’t know, sir. I’m not sure.”

“It was twenty-six years ago. I remember, my wife was pregnant. My daughter, that’s how old she is.” His thin wet smile said all the rest, though the steady overhead hum of the fluorescent tubes was the only sound anywhere.

There was a short article in the paper the next day reporting a holdup at the Nash Street Market, owned by Neil Dubbin. Gordon was relieved his name hadn’t been printed. That night Dennis called. “Lisa just