“You’re here, shopping with my wife?” Bruce sounded more than a little snockered in the middle of the afternoon, and Eric rolled his eyes. God save him from this bullshit drama in the middle of Walmart.
“No, Bruce, I’m here withmywife. She needed help with the shelves. Sandy came with us for company. I swear, Bruce… there’s no reason to—oh God.”
A single shot and a lot of screams, and then a woman’s voice. “Oh God. Bruce! Bruce, he’s still alive. Ken. Ken, you still here?”
“Shoulder,” came the strained voice. “Mary, go. Just… he’s crazy. Get out of his way.”
“Bruce,” said the loyal Mary. “Please. I swear—”
“What would you know about it?” shouted a tearful Bruce. “You’reuseless, with your arthritis and your heart and your diabetes. You wouldn’t know if they were fuckin’. You wouldn’t know if they weredead!”
Oh, this guy was aprince, Eric thought grimly, but he was a prince with a gun, and Eric edged around his final aisle to take in the expected tableau.
A chubby middle-aged couple, huddled on the floor together. The man was bleeding heavily from a wound in his shoulder that would probably be okay if dressed soon, and thewoman, barely mobile, was down on her knees, the position obviously painful, as she held her husband’s head in her lap.
A part of him was so disgusted he was a hair’s breadth from pulling out his gun and wasting this Bruce loser with one shot. Look at them—as innocent as chubby bunnies.Theseweren’t the people Eric got paid to take out.Thesewere the people who sometimes mortgaged their houses to pay him to protect their daughters or sons when they got involved with someone like… oh yeah.
Look at this gentleman here.
Bruce was a chesty, beer-gutted white man, with an untrimmed dirty-brown beard—much of it on his neck—brown teeth, and a hangdog expression.
The man could hang beads on his ear hair and still not be any more repulsive than he was right now.
“Bruce, Ken wouldn’t cheat on Mary with a supermodel,” said, presumably, this behemoth’s woman. “He sure wouldn’t cheat on her with me. Now put the gun down—”
“Then who you fuckin’!” Bruce yelled, aiming the gun at another middle-aged woman, this one a little less chubby and a little more highly maintained, with a black-dyed braid down her back and a tight sweater on over black yoga pants.
Her expression was anguished, though, as she took in her two friends huddled on the floor and tried to get her own personal monster out of their lives.
“Only you,” she said, and the bitterness in the words told Eric that this man had probably ruined sex for her for life. “After you go at me, I wouldn’t touch another man if the world was flooded with piss and he was the only tree.”
“You’re lucky to have me,” Bruce slurred, and oh, thank God, he was using his moment to wave his gun around pointingup, instead of at one of the three people he seemed to have in his sights.
Two things happened then in quick succession. One was: Eric spotted that handsome young police officer who’d been at Ace’s, lurking behind one of the shelves with giant jars of mayonnaise on it. And the other was: Bruce spottedhim.
Before the behemoth could bring his gun down to aim at Eric, Eric reacted, finding his stance by instinct and pitching a can of olives at top velocity, straight at Bruce the Behemoth’s forehead.
The smack it made filled the store, and Bruce’s gun hand dropped to his side, the gun clattering to the cement floor. He stared stupidly at Eric, who had the other olive can loaded already, and Eric let loose, aiming for the same spot on the man’s forehead.
A little low—this one broke his nose, and as the blood spurted, Bruce fell to his knees and then faceplanted on the floor next to his wife.
Who screamed and ran to her friends, grabbing a towel she’d had in her cart on the way and using it as a pad for Ken’s shoulder wound.
Brady—yes, that had been his name—with the plain sandy-brown hair and plain brown eyes and earnestly square features—ran forward and cuffed Bruce while he groaned on the floor, before pulling out his radio and calling the all clear, asking for two EMT crews and more cops to take statements.
Oh shit.
Statements.
Eric grimaced as Brady made eye contact from over the shooter’s prone form. Brady gaped at him, and Eric gave him a shrug and a wink before ghosting away, leaving Officer Brady Carnegie to talk to the hysterical Sandy, her friends Ken and Mary, and the other witnesses, none of whom had seen where those olive cans came from.
He found his cart, since it was mostly full, and took a circuitous route around the enormous store, arriving at checkout with a few extra boxes of pastries and cases of soda and beer than he’d planned, but from such a different direction that not one person asked him if he’d seen the ruckus as he bagged his new clothes and his groceries and quietly exited the building.
It wasn’t until he’d started Jai’s stupidly luxurious old Cadillac, with a bench seat that actually accommodatedJai’simpressive physique as well as Eric’s long legs, that he remembered Ernie’sotheradmonition, the one that came after “Olives. Get olives!”
Don’t shoot!
If Eric had obeyed his first impulse and simplyshotthe unfortunate Bruce, he would have been wanted by the police by now. He’d be in questioning. He’d be forced to leave when he’d just decided to stay.
