Cleanup on Aisle 4

1

Whoa! Cleanup in Aisle 4!

Did the guy not see the working end of my Kimber Ten II .45 pointed directly at him?

How? From that end it looks like a tunnel entrance for a train.

I know the clerk certainly saw it because his eyes grew big and he fainted dead away.

In the blink of an eye he went from frightened, quivering, easily controlled live weight to absolute dead weight. And that dead weight—especially because it was all-of-a-sudden dead weight—surprised the wild-eyed moron who was trying to keep control of the frightened-clerk guy.

I hate guys like that. They go all over me.

2

For the record, I tried to play fair. I was perfectly willing to give the clerk the bad guy’s gun and let the cops deal with the aftermath, only that isn’t what happened.

Here’s how it all went down:

I sauntered into the convenience store, picked up a bag of chips in Aisle 3, and went back to the cash register to pay. Only the clerk wasn’t there.

Like most people, I’m perfectly happy to wait a minute or two. But as it turned out I didn’t have to.

A commotion came from somewhere in the store, and it sounded rough.

Someone—I assume it was the clerk, a little oriental guy of about 5”2” and skinny as a rail—said, “Hey, you can’t—”

Whereupon someone else—I assume it was the guest of honor at the upcoming rat killing—yelled, “F—k you, Chink!”

Then something—I assume the bag guy—slammed something else—probably the little clerk—against one of the shelves. Whatever.

The clerk yelled, “Hey, let go!”

That’s when I reached under my jacket for my friend and started walking along the front of the aisles.

And there they were, about two-thirds of the way up Aisle 4.

As I turned into the aisle, the bad guy was behind the clerk, his left arm wrapped around the kid’s shoulders. With his right hand, he’d pressed the barrel of a punky Saturday night special against the clerk’s right temple. He was pushing the clerk toward my end of the aisle. Or trying to.

The clerk was doing his best to dig-in with his sneakers. He was also struggling and yelling, “No!” over and over again. Like that ever works.

So I stopped, raised the Kimber with both hands, and pointed past the clerk’s left ear at the bad guy’s full face. “Drop the toy gun, stupid.”

The bad guy looked at me and frowned, jerked on the struggling clerk, and ducked down a little, hiding everything but the left side of his forehead. Then he gestured against the kid’s temple with the .22. “This ain’t no toy, asshole!”

I shrugged. “Okay. But drop it, or I’ll drop you.”

That’s when the clerk focused for a second on the end of the Kimber. Then his eyes rolled up and he went slack and dropped away. Which revealed the bad guy’s entire torso and head.

I don’t gesture with my weapons. I keep them on task. I said, “It’s over. Drop it.”

But he didn’t. He only sneered and flinched. Like I said, he was a moron.

3

So I fired.

The Kimber bucked, and before it had leveled again, the bad guy was a used-to-be bad guy lying on his back and assuming room temperature.

Me, I walked back to the cash register, picked up the bag of chips and returned it to its position in Aisle 3, then turned around and left.

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in my recliner in my apartment watching an old Sam Spade movie with chip dust on my jeans.

Oh, I’d stopped at a different store for my chips. All in all, the kerfluffle at the convenience store was a good thing. At the larger store I grabbed a small container of French onion dip too. I hadn’t even thought of that in the convenience store.

The things a guy has to go through for a snack. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?

4

Of course, the bad guy spraying blood and bits of whatever passed for a brain near the end of Aisle 4 wasn’t by design. I mean, it wasn’t an assignment.

I’m a professional operative for Blackwell Ops. I do pro gratis work only when necessary. I consider it doing my part to clean the gene pool.

The way I see it, we all owe it to our communities to be civic minded and do our part to cut down on crime. Besides, holding the clerk hostage like that was not a nice thing to do.

But I’m guessing you aren’t overly concerned with things like that. You’re probably here for more about the professional stuff.

I’ve got you covered.

*******

Author Note

“Cleanup on Aisle 4” is derived in part from the novel Blackwell Ops 39: More Paul Stone.

About the Author

I was born in New Mexico, seasoned in Texas and baked in Arizona, so I'm pretty well done.

For a time, I wrote under five personas and several pseudonyms, but I take a pill for that now and write only under my own name. Mostly.

I am a prolific professional fiction writer by pretty much any standard. In just over 8 years I’ve written 110 novels, 10 novellas, and around 280 short stories across several genres. None of that is a typo.