Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

For the first time in over a week I didn’t get any mail. That was Sunday. Credit card applications, junk mail, and post office mess-ups are all I usually get anyhow. I think once in May I got a letter from my great-aunt, about some surgery her husband was going to have. But other than that, nothing meaningful.

Well, aside from the mystery letters, with nothing written on them but the date in the upper right hand corner of the page. They would come in my mail, with my return address, and with some illegible address on the front, and adequate postage to ensure delivery. At first I thought it was just a mistake, and that it belonged to a neighbor, but then I saw my own name, in someone else’s handwriting, in the upper left hand corner of the envelope, with the correct address—even the apartment number, which everyone else gets wrong (most people write 6B, when it’s really B6).

I threw the first one away, but the next day another one came, so I dug the first one out of the trash can. I set them out and tried to see if there was some sort of secret message in them. No lemon juice, oil writing, or indentations. I was stumped. I started analyzing the situation. Who would do this, and for what purpose? I didn’t have any known enemies, except for people at work I ignored (actually, I didn’t know what they thought of me either—if anyone were to be my enemy, it would have to be them, if they expected to befriend me and got disappointed by my apathy). Which brings me to my apathy: I don’t know why I cared about this. For some reason, I did.

The next day another one came. Nothing different, except the handwriting was a little sloppier on the address lines. I smelled the envelopes, in case there was some sort of drug on them (wish I would have thought of that on the first day), but there was nothing there. I broke out into no rash or hallucinatory cavorting. I looked on the internet to see if anyone else had this problem, but after I couldn’t find anything for a minute, I gave up. It wasn’t worth it. So I decided to stow away the envelopes in my table drawer.

For the next three days they came—still nothing written on them. Then Sunday came, and no mail. Then came Monday. I awoke to a knocking at my front door—5:30 a.m. Wha-? The knocking continued until I was a few feet away from the door. I opened the door and looked outside. I heard footsteps running away around the apartment corner. And I didn’t care. I tried to close the door, but something stopped it: a cardboard box. Perfect, at 5:30 a.m.

The box wasn’t big, and it was sealed with blue masking tape. Now, if anything had anthrax in it, this was going to be it. I opened it anyway. It wasn’t anthrax; it was a pen and a piece of paper. I was very tired. I threw them away and went back to bed.

I didn’t have to get up until 9 for work, but I woke up at 8:15. I looked in the mirror after brushing my teeth, to further my anthrax monitoring: same face, same brown eyes, same big nose, same perfect smile, same three days- growth on my jaw. Same clothes I’d wore for the past few days. Same smell. I showered and changed into fresher attire.

I walked out into the living area to find a pen balancing on the rim of my trash can. Fancy that. I didn’t remember that being like that at 5:30 in the morning—ahh… that’s why I’m so tired. 5:30. Stupid pranksters. I picked up the pen and put it in my pocket—after all, my old pen was almost out of ink. And this one didn’t have the end chewed off, the ultimate fate of anything that is habitually in my hands.

I went to work. I sell health insurance—big deal. It makes rent easy, especially since I’m on salary and commission, and I can get into convince-anyone-of-anything mode at the drop of a heartbeat. I’m sure that the insurance I sold didn’t really do any harm, and probably did a lot of good for anyone who bought it and had something happen.

The work day was usual. Except I kept thinking about the pen in my pocket. I took it out to look at it every once in a while. It was your typical gel pen, except with no discernible brand name anywhere on it. But why would anyone leave me a pen on my doorstep at 5:30 a.m.? Come to think of it, I didn’t notice any postage or address on the cardboard box, which meant it was probably meant for just me. Which led me to think about the paper it came with. Suddenly I couldn’t wait for 6 p.m. to come.

I got home and went straight to the garbage, picked up the crumpled paper and folded it out on the table. There were only a few handwritten words on the paper: “Pen for paper, care? Draw, write, fantasy, true.” I tried to decipher what it meant, but gave up after a while. I ate dinner and tried to read some Borges, but that was just too existential for the evening, so I turned on the TV. Nothing good was on, and I read the mystery note again.

I took out a paper from the drawer, crumpled and a little torn from being thrown away a week before. What was I supposed to write (if that’s what the note actually meant)? Who was I writing for? Where was I going to send it? Why even bother?

As I was thinking these thoughts, I started scribbling. I looked down at the paper, with last week’s date on the upper right hand corner, and saw incoherent lines ending at the tip of the pen in my hand. I frowned at it—not because it was something I didn’t want to do, but because the scribbles looked like a cartoon creature, in a way. The frown soon turned into a smirk, because it looked pathetic. I remembered then how horrible of an artist I was. On a whim, though, I drew legs on it, and a cartoon bubble with the words “I eat rocks” inside of it. Some imagination, huh? I shoved the paper and pen back in the drawer and went to go take another shower.

That night I dreamed a fantastic dream about a little space explorer on a foreign planet, using only his dexterity and little laser pop gun to escape giant hands that were chasing him. In the dream though, the hands turned out to be mine, and also there was some guy from work wearing a yellow jumpsuit running away from a fast-moving, lightning-bearing cloud. I hoped the dream wasn’t prophetic or indicative of anything that was really going on in my subconscious life.

When I woke, the vision of the little space man was so vivid, and so aesthetically pleasing, that I decided to disregard my lack of imagination and try to draw the little guy out on the paper. I got to the table after brushing my teeth and sat down in the chair in front of the drawer.

As I touched the knob of the drawer, I heard a noise like a child’s whimper. I froze, because the noise came from somewhere very near. I heard it again. I turned on the lights in the adjacent kitchen, wary of every cabinet door. After I had opened them all and found nothing but cans of beans, cereal, and potatoes, I heard the noise again, except this time it sounded like it came from the bathroom. I checked all the cabinets in there and found nothing unusual. I heard the noise again: from the kitchen. Or was it? A slight hearing impediment made it difficult to judge direction when I heard sounds. I had one thought then: the drawer on the table. It could have been a kitten, but how would it have gotten there?

I opened the drawer half way, slowly. Nothing but the paper. Except, where was the drawing I had made last night? I picked up the stack of paper and thumbed through them. The top one had a hole in it, exactly the shape of the drawing, as I remembered it. I listened for the noise. Nothing. I put the paper back down, and then I heard it: “Eieetericks!” It was much louder.

I opened the drawer further: it was a mouse! Funny, because it didn’t sound like any rodent noise I had heard before. The mouse, a white one, was huddled up in the corner of the drawer, quivering, its tail apparently coiled up underneath it.

Taking the drawer gently out of the table, I carried it into the kitchen, with an eye on the mouse the whole time. I wanted a plastic bag or at least a wad of paper towels to pick it up with, and then I’d decide what to do with it. I couldn’t find any plastic bags, except on my refrigerator grocery list, so I unrolled about 6 paper towels. I didn’t want the little pest biting me!

As I reached my hand into the drawer, the mouse uncoiled and started walking toward the other end of the drawer…but it wasn’t a mouse. I froze and dropped the paper towels into the drawer. Huh?

Here I will pause and tell you the difficulty of trying not to write this out in a cliché way. Whenever you read something science fiction or fantasy, where two worlds collide, it’s always like: “I couldn’t believe my eyes. My dreams had come true in front of me! There, before me, was the [insert physical impossibility here], living, breathing, and only five feet away!” or something like that. I hate to admit it, but in a situation like this, much like at night when I’m looking through the windows facing the parking lot and “see” a human figure leaning out from behind one of the birch trees, I do just that—assume it is what I think it looks like, right away, despite reason and rationality—and in this situation, I thought: “That thing in there—I drew it last night!” and, for added effect, I appended an “It can’t be!” to the end of that thought.

There it was. I lifted the paper towels. It was no mouse.

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but it wasn’t a matter of left or right. I woke up as I fell off the foot, onto my shoes and my just-in-case baseball bat. It was just before noon. Sleeping-in had its price that day. At least I didn’t have to go to work. I wished I had a real job. Behold the groggy downward-spiral of thought.

I shook off the bad feelings and checked my 28-year-old body for bruises as I walked down the hall to the front of my house. It was stuffy inside my house, so I opened the front door, looked up, and sneezed. Maybe an air purifier would be a good, justifiable investment. As I looked down and north, three ducks, one drake and two dull browns, flitted to me. It didn’t take long to figure out they had guns for my bare feet. Bold ducks. Before they could attack my toes, I hopped over the threshold.

There was a broken sprinkler in my neighbor’s yard and it made a miniature lake in her flower garden, to which the ducks lighted after I was safe indoors. Why were there ducks in the front yard anyway? The reservoir where they usually were was a three blocks’ run away, which I made every Tuesday and Thursday, at the park.

I saw a picture once in a magazine with a duck in a sound-engineer’s room, with all of the foam cross-hatched pads on the walls. The caption said that a quack doesn’t echo, which would make the duck the most inconsequential and irresponsible animal out there, at least in my book. Things happen to ducks; ducks don’t do anything, and even when they make a noise, it’s not around half as long as other animals’ noises are. Ducks don’t build dams and they don’t feed too many Americans (that I know of).

I guess I’m sort of a duck, for that matter. I own a few gas stations around town and I stock vending machines. No one’s ever been held up at one of my joints to my knowledge, I don’t write books that change people’s lives, and pay a lot of taxes. Nobody knows gas station owners or vending machine stockers, and what I say only matters in my little world of gas prices and in the investigations of the bursts of kicking and rocking on my machines.

I shrugged the matter off. It was Saturday, I really did have friends, it wouldn’t be long until I had forgotten about the ducks, and I was going to detail my car. I put on my moccasins and changed into an old t-shirt, gathered my car-washing supplies, and found a newspaper for spotless windows.

As soon as I had rinsed off my 1968 Volkswagen Beetle (baby blue and cream two-tone, but a little worse than average Volkswagen condition nowadays), I noticed a black car pull up across the street with windows that were too tinted to be legal. I think it was a ‘70s LeBaron, with expensive rims and no radio antenna. By the time I had soaped down the entire body of the car I also noticed a sticker on the driver’s side of my back bumper.

This was a contradiction of my philosophy. I had vowed years ago that I would never even accept a free bumper sticker.

I expected it’d be a campaign sticker. I knew some nerds in my World Lit class back at the community college who put Republican bumper stickers on some of the liberal professors’ vehicles. Knee-slapping hilarity, I know. But the one on my car said, “Prince Charming” in black block letters against a fire-engine-red field.

I reached to pull off the sticker and the driver’s door opened on the dark LeBaron. A male voice, hoarse and cracking, shouted, “I knew it was you!” I straightened up and shaded my eyes so I could see who was talking to me from across the street.

He was no one I had ever seen before. Pale, skinny, and nervous, he wore a black A-shirt under a navy-blue pinstripe sports coat and tucked into his faded black jeans. His head looked like a squished cantaloupe that was smoothed and polished, but one that had two deep-set brown eyes, a flat nose, and a lipless frown. I never caught his name, but I’ll call him Bowser. I name all of my cantaloupes Bowser.

“Excuse me?” I said and remembered that if this guy bothered me I could soak him at very least.

“I saw you last night stealing my stuff. I saw your car and your bumper sticker, Charming,” Bowser spat out in a hard-knocks-school trained staccato. He glided across the street in his white Reeboks until he was too close, then reached down behind my bumper. He pulled out what looked like a thick wad of duct tape. Bowser continued spitting out words like pills: “It’s all right, bo. We’ll forget the whole thing.”

I liked this situation as much as I liked being attacked by territorial ducks in the wrong territory. But I let Bowser walk off with the duct tape and didn’t say another word. I might as well just let this slide. I didn’t want any trouble. It was Saturday.

I finished detailing my Beetle, but not thoroughly because my mind was ticking off thoughts like seconds. The LeBaron didn’t leave. I kept a wary eye (my right one) on the shady windows.

I vacuumed the interior out after that, still watching the dark car, feeling used. I had been reading too much Hammett lately to not be suspicious. My car had been used as a drop-off for a pusher, I concluded.

I thought back to the first (and only) cigarette I had ever tried and remembered gagging and promising myself that I’d never do anything to alter my personality besides sleep and sugar. I couldn’t dare imagine looking at myself in the mirror and seeing a prematurely gray hophead; being prematurely gray was enough. But I guess it’s different when you’re hooked, so I planned on never getting started.

Soon enough the “used” feeling got carried away by that train of thought. All these self-reassuring, I’m-no-junkie pep-thoughts got me riled up and I started to march over to that car calling the fuzz on my cell with its license number. Duck soup.

But the car had no license plates. Rats.

I finished vacuuming, locked up my car, and took my car-cleaning supplies back inside. I set them in the entryway, scrambled onto the couch, and set up camp behind the Venetian blinds. Before two minutes had passed, I watched bald Bowser sprint from behind my car to his and peel out. So much for the stakeout. He must have gone to my car as soon as I turned my back to walk inside.

I walked back outside, peeked around the corner of my garage to make the LeBaron was out of sight, and went to go peel off the wretched bumper sticker. I knelt down and reached for the curled corner and expected it to be at least a little sticky, since it wasn’t there yesterday. It was grainy, not sticky at all. Then I realized that the paper backing of the sticker was still intact, and duct tape had been used to fix it to my bumper. I peeled it off and beheld a thin but impressive wad of cash between the two strips of doubled-over tape.

I went inside and thought for a long time, while cleaning up and doing various chores that didn’t take mental activity. I waited until all my necessary jobs were done to take the small piece of invisible tape off of the roll of cash. I counted $1650 and wondered if this was a threat to my safety resting in my hands. No doubt someone would be after this money. I guessed not all drug deals were well thought out, especially if under the influence.

The duct tape on the back of the sticker was well-used, though, so I gathered that this little play had been working for a while. The one thing they must have banked on was the usual cursive attention most people give to older, junky cars.

I was an exception, at least on that day, because I was tired of my car being as cluttered as my mind. I took action at the precisely wrong time. These are all just speculations, but I’m also guessing that these drug drops went off without a snag most of the time, without confrontation.

Walking back to my car at dusk, after much acute thinking, I heard ducks making noise somewhere in the indistinguishable surroundings. It was toward the end of mating season, and amorous birds didn’t make me any less nervous. I sipped on my root beer bottle as I looked for something that Bowser might have dropped, any clue I could find. There was nothing. I knocked off the rest of my root beer and walked back inside. As I stepped over the threshold and reached for the knob, I heard the clouds grumbling.

“Spiff,” I muttered to myself. “All that work for nothing.” I savored the last few shiny moments of dusk-lit glory my car had to offer for the time being, and I shut the door. Then I did the dishes.

After all my chores were done, I looked out of my Venetian blinds and noticed two things: one was the dark clouds coming from the East, and two was a black, tinted Mercedes with its running lights on parked across the street, where the LeBaron had been just hours before. “Could anything else go wrong today?” I sighed. It could be nothing, all in my mind.

I scuffled to the kitchen table with bottle in hand to sit and think, but as I sat down the doorbell rang. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I swallowed and opened the door to a well-dressed man of 30 or so with his hands in his pockets, looking to the right. He seemed to be intent on something down the street, but when I opened the door all the way, he turned and faced me. He spread out his words like cream cheese: “My car broke down. Mind if I use your phone?”

I was pretty sure I could hear the engine purring, but the rain was picking up. If the engine really were running, at least he didn’t plan on staying at my place long.

I just went with his little plot. Maybe I let him in because the last adventure I had had was ten years ago when some old lady in her Olds ran into me on my bike and I broke my collarbone, if that could be called an adventure.

As he stepped inside and I closed the door, the noise of the rain picked up, and there was no way to hear anything but the downpour outside.

One of my chores earlier was to put the bumper sticker on my refrigerator door, which was right next to the land line.

I pointed my guest to the phone, excused myself, set my root beer bottle on the coffee table in the living room, and crept back to my bedroom to get my baseball bat. I could hear my visitor talking loudly on the phone. My just-in-case bat came in handy, filling me with just-in-case security. Was I getting too worked up over nothing? I reassured myself that I had reason enough to be cautious, since my car had been used for a drug run, and I didn’t let it be.

I sneaked back to the living room, set down the bat under the coffee table, and sat up just in time. He came around the corner and saw me sitting there.

“Let me introduce myself,” he smoothed out. “I’m Alfred. You can call me Al.”

“Nice to meet you. Do you need help? I’m Manny,” I replied. The nerves started tingling. There was only so much courtesy I could have for a suspicious stranger in a suit whose car wasn’t really broken down.

“No, sir. I have some friends coming in a few minutes to help me with my car. Mind if I stay inside out the rain until they get here?” I said I didn’t, but I did. I asked him if he wanted some water. He said yes, and I walked into the kitchen.

When I got there, the first thing I noticed was the absence of the bumper sticker. That confirmed my suspicions. I started planning my actions. I had the following assets: baseball bat, thorough knowledge of the floorplan, moccasins. My list wasn’t so lengthy. What had I gotten myself into?

So there we were. He sat with glass in hand against the west wall. I was against the east wall on the couch, just below the big window. Two minutes of silence passed. I ventured.

“I noticed you swiped my bumper sticker. I was growing fond of it. Sing, sap.”

He flicked out a switchblade. That was something I hadn’t counted into my plans.

“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.”

I hadn’t made a noise. Not good: someone was watching me. I stepped back after I gave Al the receiver. He listened for a while, then said, “How did…I’ll get it back, I swear! Give me a minute.” He muffled the phone on his stomach, carefully placing the receiver where there weren’t stitches, I suppose.

“Manny, I need the address book. They don’t trust me anymore, and they’re going to snub me if I don’t give them that stuff back. I don’t know how,” he said, but I knew how, because as he said that a little red dot appeared on his right nostril and wiggled around for a while until it disappeared.

“Listen, Al: ‘they’ have a laser trained on your face right now,” I said and he froze, looking out the window. “Which brings me to who ‘they’ are. Some sort of family going on? Spill.”

I was expecting a hesitation like in the movies. There was one. After a few seconds of biting his lower lip, Al said, “‘They’ are called the Barbershop. That’s all you have to know, because if you don’t look for them, you’d never know anything about them. They don’t run this town, but they tell who comes in and goes out of my business.”

I said, “Hmm.” I remembered promising myself years ago that I’d never get caught up with drug cartels. I guessed the address book was full of contact information for customers, cohorts, or both.

The red dot appeared again and moved over his left eye, so he could see it was there. He was sweating. Suddenly he burst into a sob and screamed, “Show them the book!” That scream was going to attract some attention, and I couldn’t afford putting anyone else in danger, so I jammed the visitor’s chair under the door handle. I could hear the cop stirring.

I whispered to Al, “Put the phone back up to your ear and tell them I’m going to slide the book under this door, so they’d better send someone here in three minutes. Tell them to take the gun off of you, and tell them that if I don’t hear someone knocking in some creative way I’m going to do something irrational. And I want another creative knock on the door after they’ve got the book to let me know the right person got it. And whisper that to him.” I was sweating too. I didn’t want any part of this, but my desires got me nowhere. I was in this trouble, and I had to get out.

He told the Barbershop rep all that I wanted him to tell. I waited a minute and a half. I heard footsteps and someone trying the door handle a couple of times, and then I heard keys jingling. A key went in and turned, but the door stood still because of the chair, and because I was sitting in the chair. The footsteps went away. Where was the bull? I took the chair down and cracked the door open, enough to poke my noggin out. I looked to the right, and there was nobody in the hall. I looked to the left, and there was the cop talking with the nurse, holding his keys up for her to look at.

One minute left. I closed the door again and didn’t put the chair back. The laser was bouncing around on the art deco painting on the wall by Al. His eyes followed its every move, and he was tense, but happy it wasn’t on his head anymore. He sort of reminded me of a cat.

Then came the knock like a drum roll and then a staccato set of triplets. I toed the book under the door, and the same knock came again. Relief. A minute later the laser disappeared for good.

A minute after that and the cop tried the door again. It opened slowly, and the bull’s hand was on his hip between his keys and his Glock. He relaxed when he saw me sitting with my hands folded on my lap in the visitor’s chair next to Al.

“Sir, what went on in here? And who was that clown who was just kneeling by the door?” he asked. I ignored his questions and said that I was calm because I was trying not to cause the man with the gun on the roof across the street to get suspicious. I knew the sniper was gone because I had risked a look out the window, but I wanted extra police presence to ensure I could get to my car safely. The bulls came, and I had a few last words for Al.

He promised me he would put me on the white list. That meant protection, or was only supposed to mean protection since there was no way I could trust him. I would just have to be careful. I told him that.

As I walked out, Al called out to me: “Manny, how come you gotta be so rough to me?”

“You’re a leech. Get a real job.” I meant after prison, of course. I flicked the etched key I had taken from him earlier and it landed between his legs on the sheets.

On the elevator ride down to the first floor, I counted $3570 from the bumper sticker cash and the wad from Al’s wallet and I put it all into an envelope. At the front desk I asked about donations to children patients, left the envelope and walked back to my Beetle. As I opened my car door, I looked up and saw a jagged V in the sky. The season was over.