YOU’RE SCARING A little boy,” I said, trying to keep my voice both low and calm.
“Sunny?” Richard said from the backseat.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m just going to shut the door so my friend and I can talk.”
I did that.
“The boy isn’t a part of this,” I said.
“Sure he is.”
“What do you want?”
“What,” the voice behind me said. “Got no smart shit to say to me now about who got the gun and who doesn’t and who’s the badass and who’s not?”
I kept hoping that someone would come walking down Bremen Street. No one did.
I waited.
“What I am here to tell you,” he said, “is that if you don’t stop nosying around where you shouldn’t be nosying around, no telling who might get hurt.”
“Who sent you?” I said.
“Somebody wants you to stop nosying around,” he said. “Somebody wants me to tell you to just go live your life while you still got one. A life, I’m talking about. You and yours.”
He jammed the gun harder into the small of my back.
“Nod if you understand what I’m telling you,” he said.
I did.
“Can’t get nowhere by threatening you?” he said. “So now the message is we dialing things up.”
“Message delivered,” I said. “Now let the boy and me leave.”
“Not before you reach into your purse and take out the gun I know you got in there, and hand it to me,” he said.
I took the .38 out by the handle and put it in his free hand without turning around.
“Now you get in your hooptie car and put your hands on the wheel and count to twenty,” he said. “And if I see you turn around before I’m gone, I just might start shooting and let the bullet figure out where the fuck it wants to go.”
He pressed himself into me again.
“We clear?” he said.
“Crystal,” I said.
I got inside the car. Put my hands on the wheel, ten o’clock and two o’clock, just like they taught you in driver’s ed. Then I counted and waited.
“Sunny,” Richard said. “I’m scared.”
“It’s fine now,” I said. “Sunny ma’am would never let anything happen to you.”
“Was he really your friend?” he said.
“No,” I said. “Just someone trying to play a dumb game.”
As I put the car into gear and pulled down Bremen, Richard wanted to know why, if it was just a game, I had a gun.
“It’s part of my job, carrying one,” I said.
“Will that man give it back to you?” the boy said.
“Eventually,” I said.