I could feel the weight of the sawed-off in my lap.
Rough stock, cut down to a pistol grip.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked.
“None of your business,” Slug replied.
“What are we going to do with it?”
“We’re going to hit those fuckers tonight. You know they’ll be at Sledgehammer. It’s tradition, everybody’s going to be there.”
I lifted the weapon and caught a faint whiff of grease. I wore the leather gloves Slug had insisted I take.
“Is it loaded?”
“Nah man, not yet.”
Slug left the room; I heard him rummaging in the hallway closet. He came back and dropped a grocery bag with two dozen shells on the living-room table. After rolling up his sleeves, he planted his ass next to me on the sofa, picked up my driver’s license off the table, and started raking lines on the chipped IKEA plate in front of him.
“Are we really doing this, dude?” I asked.
I wasn’t even sure if I was talking about the amphetamines or the shotgun. This was the first time I’d held a real firearm, but I’d known for some time it was inevitable. Ever since they shot Big George last month.
“Of course we are. That’s why I bought the damn thing.”
He was putting the finishing touches on the last of four rails, now neatly lined up on the plate. Slug tightened the rolled-up dollar bill in his hand, bent forward, and deftly disappeared one of the lines up his nose. He passed the note my way, and I followed suit. The familiar burn hit the back of my throat, and my heart started to pound, from the speed, and the anticipation. I started fiddling with the shotgun, trying to get it open so I could load it. Fuck, I thought, I have no idea what I’m doing.
Sledgehammer was a bar on the outskirts of the industrial zone, just across the road from the cluster of high-rises Slug and I called home. The front was a patchwork of corrugated metal, I thought I might catch tetanus just looking at it. It didn’t have a sign, just a nondescript black door flanked by two gorillas who looked like they’d broken a graveyard’s worth of alcoholic bones between them. One was a blond with a ponytail named Dano. The other was a bald guy with a thick black mustache known as Ronny Rat, when he was out of earshot, and Ronny Roy when he wasn’t. Not because he snitched to the boys in blue, but because he once stole an entire wheel of cheese from a specialty shop in the mall during a drug bender, years ago. They were the gatekeepers of this less-than-fine establishment and foot soldiers for the man in the back office. The man responsible for what happened to Big George.
I looked over at Slug, sitting in the driver’s seat of his old, rusty VW bug. Even though we lived just across the street, we’d taken the car and circled the block a few times before parking in the shadows of the empty lot beside Sledgehammer. We’d entered from the alley behind the bar, so the goons out front wouldn’t make us. Slug looked back at me and smiled. The amphetamines had worked up his courage, he looked positively crazed. Then, something that resembled a coherent thought hit me.
“Are we just winging this shit? We didn’t even plan anything. We just drove around for twenty minutes listening to Tom Waits.”
“Stop worrying so much, we’ve got a fucking blunderbuss,” he answered back.
His confidence, and my own chemically enhanced courage, erased my doubts.
All of a sudden, the door opened, and a short, stout man in a bone-colored suit stepped out. Steven “Ahas” Roy. Ronny’s older uncle and though smaller in stature, his presence somehow dwarfed his nephew. Ahas was a nickname earned while stationed overseas. It means snake in Tagalog, and unlike his nephew’s nickname, there was no humor or shame in this epithet. This was the man behind the mahogany desk. He was followed by his right-hand man, a tall man with hollow eyes named Doc Anderson, known for his murderous temper. Doc was the piece of human filth who’d pulled the trigger that night, right after Halloween, when Big George had accidentally burned Ahas on the cheek with the ember of his cigarette. Through the door I could hear the jukebox playing “Jingle Bell Rock”. It was the annual Sledgehammer Christmas party.
Slug hissed, “Go!”
And before I knew it, I was out of the car, sprinting toward the entrance, shotgun in hand. I let loose both barrels at once and hit Doc square in the chest. The blast opened an oozing, red-and-black hole the size of my head. I immediately realized I had an empty gun and three, most likely armed, professional criminals standing in front of me. It all hit me at once. These guys are murderers. They kill people for a living. They know how shotguns work. They know how to load a pistol. I’m a fucking junkie, avenging my dead junkie friend. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, and now I’m about to die too.
Time slowed to a crawl. Ahas threw himself to the ground in his now-soiled suit, stained with the blood of his best friend and confidant. Dano and Ronny Rat reached into their suit jackets and pulled out pistols. I turned on my heel and saw Slug peeling away into the night, the red lights of his VW burning like the ember of Big George’s last cigarette.
The first shot hit me in the shoulder, but I kept running. Up ahead, I saw Slug skid off the road and smash into an electric pole. The second shot tore through my lung, and I hit the ground. I heard a woman scream in fear, and felt a pang of nostalgia. It reminded me of Christmas at home. I wondered if Mom would know I’d died. Footsteps approached.
“Who the fuck is this guy?” a disembodied voice asked.
Snowflakes melted on my face as I died on Christmas Eve.