Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

“Where’s the cash? Maybe you’d like a little haircut.” His voice wasn’t so smooth anymore. It resembled more of a garbage disposal rather than cream cheese. When he mentioned the haircut, he swiped the shiv in the air recklessly.

“It’s down here in the cigar box,” I said, purposefully appearing to be nervous (although not all a guise). I pointed down below the coffee table. Al rose and yanked his tie off with his right hand. It looked like he was having trouble, but he threw it on the carpet. He then took a few steps forward with his switchblade leading him.

I didn’t have a cigar box down there. Just the baseball bat. What a pinch. Why hadn’t I called the bulls when I had the chance? Had I had a chance?

The phone rang toward the beginning of my crisis and Al looked over his shoulder. Seize the day, I said. I tried to swing the situation in my favor, but all I got was the bat behind my ear when Al turned back around a second later.

I swung the bat as Al opened his eyes wider. His left hand went crunch and the shiv bent and clattered against the wall. Al yelled a dirty word. On reflex, his right hand shot out and yanked the bat from my arms. I wasn’t expecting that.

He tossed the bat through the front window, which wasn’t tempered as I found out. The bat damaged the blinds on its way. A cold, misty draft passed the back of my neck.

“What now?” I asked as I grabbed the root beer bottle. It was the only thing to grab. It should have been on my list of assets.

“Give me the cash and I’ll be nice,” Al spat.

“Of course. I trust you. How about,” I said as I broke the bottle on the edge of the coffee table and raised its jagged edges in the direction of Al’s face, “how about you just be nice?”

“Whoa, bo,” he said, looking over my shoulder at the window. He turned white. He continued, saying, “Wait, wait. I’ll make it up to you. Let me get my wallet out.” What a quick repentance, or what a sham. He reached into his back pocket, but didn’t pull out his wallet. I couldn’t easily stop him without jumping on or over the coffee table, and I couldn’t afford to put myself in a more vulnerable position.

I suspected he would pull out something dangerous, and he did. It was another switchblade. I wondered how many he had in his pockets, and whether or not he used them often. Then I ducked as he leapt forward. The ducking foiled his plan.

He landed on top of me with his blade in my left bicep and my root beer bottle somewhere in his lower gut. My dome was wedged in the bottom of his ribcage, and he was twisting his shiv into my arm. I stood up and heaved Al, who was lighter than he looked, through the serrated hole that used to be my front window. He took the Venetian fixture with him as he flew.

I looked out of the window and, by the light of my living room, saw Al on the ground, motionless. He was soaked and getting wetter, but he didn’t move for a long time. I walked around the coffee table, grabbed his necktie, and wrapped it around my left bicep to stop the bleeding. I couldn’t use that arm much.

I knocked the lower teeth out of the window cavity and stepped out. If Al were faking his unconsciousness, the sound of the door opening, faint as it would have been under the rainfall, would have been his cue to get ready with some plan B. As I stepped out I heard footsteps running away, barely discernable in the rain. I didn’t know how much to worry about that. I wasn’t red-handed, but I must have looked impressive stepping out of a wrecked window with a bloody, broken bottle in my hand, backlit by the light of a fight-wrecked living room.

Al’s hands were empty, he still didn’t move, and he was bleeding badly. There was glass in him all over. The blood petered out of his wounds and mixed with the rainwater that was flooding into the flowerbeds in my neighbor’s yard.

I wondered if he really had friends coming to help him. No one came, but he surely had friends if he had any business. Maybe the footsteps scurrying away were his friends’.

I called the authorities and they were in my yard in fifteen minutes. As I was waiting for them I got an idea and scrambled to act it out. I went through all of Al’s pockets and rumpled all of his clothes to find some sort of leverage. I needed a way to make sure that Al wouldn’t send his friends to do a little number on me as soon as he could get the word out.

It didn’t take long before I found his wallet, the bumper sticker, and keys on his person and a little black address book in his glove compartment in the Mercedes. I pocketed the address book, pulled a wad of dough out of his wallet, left the sticker in Al’s pocket for the fuzz to find, and examined his keys. There were four keys on it. One was a Mercedes key, two were home keys (probably for an entry lock and a deadbolt), and one was a key with a number engraved on it. I guessed it was for a storage unit. I took the numbered key off of the ring. Then I went inside and stashed my finds underneath the silverware drawer.

When the cops got there, I gave them the almost-full report, telling them about the bumper sticker, and then watching them find it in Al’s pocket. I told them how I thought it was the signal for the hopheads, and showed the switchblades without my fingerprints on them. They had plenty of questions for me, and I told them about everything but the money and Al’s personal effects I had swiped. I had self-defense going for me, and that wasn’t a lie.

I had to go to the ER to get my arm sewn up, and I slept through most of Sunday. It rained nonstop until Monday afternoon. That gave me plenty of alone time and time enough to clean up my soggy, bloody, chaotic living room.

Al was in the downtown hospital with a cop outside his door until he was patched enough to be tried and sent to the can. I gave him a visit on Tuesday. The cop was asleep when I went in. Al wasn’t happy to see me, but I made him talk after I closed the door with a soft click.

I was greeted with bitter words: “Thanks, chump. Look what you did to me!” He was actually talking to the ceiling looking at me through the corner of his eye. He had stitches all over the area I could see.

“I could have lingered a while. None of the neighbors suspected anything because it was dark and the rain covered most of the racket of the glass. You should thank me for calling the police.” I looked at his medical report on the foot of his bed. Something important had been punctured, and his surgery had gone well. That was all I could get out of it. I stepped over to the open window and looked down three stories at the sidewalk below.

I asked Al what I should do with the money. He cursed and demanded it, of course. I reminded him that I had his little black book, and told him it was a little soggy from the rain, but I could get at least forty names to the bulls whenever I wanted to. He clammed up but said he didn’t care.

I asked him what the right thing to do with the money would be. He swore at me and gave me a Sunday-School answer. I told him, all right, I would give it to a charity. He groaned. Then the room phone rang. Since Al was out of commission for the time being, I answered it. There was immediately the sound of wind over the mouthpiece of whoever was calling. Then came the voice.

“Who are you? Give the phone to Al.”