It’s time to look at what’s been written for the unfortunate Annalisa, who had been caught up in a situation that is rapidly getting out of her control, not that she had it under control in the first place.  Perhaps it’s time to start reassessing her bad boy phase and think about a new lifestyle. 

Drugs, for her, were fun to begin with, but she can now see the effect they have on long term users, and the question will be, can she learn from this and move on?

Annalisa looked at the two men facing her.

Simmo, the boy on the floor, had told her that the shopkeeper would be a pushover, he was an old man who’d just hand over the drugs, rather than cause trouble for himself.

Where Simmo had discovered what the shopkeeper’s true vocation, dispensing drugs to the neighborhood addicts, she didn’t know, but it was not the first place like this they had visited.

She had always known Simmo had a problem, but he had assured her he had it under control.  Until a month ago, when he had tried something new.

It had changed him.

The breaking point came earlier that day when, seeing how sick he was, she threatened to leave.  It brought out the monster within him, and he threatened to kill her.  Not long after he had changed into a whimpering child pleading with her to stay, that he hadn’t meant anything he’d said before.

All he needed was one more ‘score’ to get his ‘shit’ together, and he would do as she asked, and find help.

She believed him.

He said he knew a place not far from the apartment, a small shop where what he needed was available, and said he had the money.

That should have been the first sign he was not telling the truth because she had been funding his habit until her parents cut off the money supply.  She suspected her father had put a private detective on to find her, had, and reported back, and rather than make a scene, just cut her off so she would have to come home or starve.  Her father was no better than Simmo.

And, as soon as they stepped into the shop, Simmo pulled out the gun,

Instead of the shopkeeper cowered like Simmo said he would, he had laughed at them and told them to get out.  Simmo started ranting and waving the gun around, then all of a sudden collapsed. 

There was a race for the gun which spilled out of Simmo’s hand, and she won. 

That was just before the customer burst into the shop.

It had been shortly before closing time.  Simmo had said there would be no one else around.

Wrong again.

Now she had another problem to deal with, a man who was clearly as scared shitless as she was.

This was worse than any bad hair day, or getting out of the wrong side of bed day, this was, she was convinced, the last day of her life.

She heard a strange sound come from beside her and looked down.  There was a trickle of blood coming out of his mouth and Simmo was making strange sounds like he was choking.

Any other time she might have been concerned, but the hard reality of it was, Simmo was never going to change.  She was only surprised at the fact it took so long for her to realize it.

As for the man standing in front of her, she was safe from the shopkeeper with him around, so he would have to stay.

“No.  Stay.”

Another glance at the shopkeeper told her she had made the right decision, his expression said it all.  Gun or no gun, the moment she was alone with him, he would kill her.

© Charles Heath 2018-2020

I’ve been looking at the start again, and something about it is nagging at me.

The main character needs a little work, and the start doesn’t exactly grab by the lapels of your coat.

Not yet.

The fact that smoking might kill him yet was, at that moment, an understatement.   If he was honest, when he told Maisie he had given them up, it should have been the truth.

And if it had been, he would not be in the situation he was.  A lame excuse to go down to the corner shop, had him panicking about getting there before the shop closed at 11 p.m.

His momentum propelled him through the door, causing the customer warning bell to ring loudly as the door bashed into it, and before the sound had died away, he knew he was in trouble.

It took a second, perhaps three, to sum up the situation. 

A young girl, about 16 or 17, scared, looking sideways at a man on the ground, then Alphonse, and then Jack.  He recognized the gun, a Luger, German, relic of WW2, perhaps the boy or her father’s souvenir, or more likely a stolen weapon, now pointing at him then Alphonse, then back to him.

Jack took another second or two to consider if he could disarm her.  No, the distance was too great.  He put his hands out where she could see them.  No sudden movements, try to remain calm, but his heart rate up to the point of cardiac arrest.  No point making a bad situation worse.

Pointing with the gun, she said, “Move closer to the counter where I can see you better.”

Everything but her hand was steady as a rock.  The only telltale signs of stress, the beads of perspiration on her brow and the slight tremor of her gun hand. 

It was 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the shop; almost mind-numbing.

Jack shivered and then did as he was told. 

A few seconds more for him to decide she was going to be unpredictable.

“What’s wrong with your friend?”  Jack tried the friendly approach after he’d taken the three steps sideways necessary to reach the counter.

The shopkeeper, Alphonse, who, Jack noted seemed to have aged another ten years in the last few months, spoke instead; “I suspect he’s an addict, looking for a score.  At the end of his tether, my guess, and here to get some money for a fix.”

A simple hold up that had gone very wrong. 

Wrong time, wrong place, in more ways than one Jack thought, now realizing he had walked into a very dangerous situation.  She didn’t look like a user.  The boy on the ground; he did, and he looked like he was going through the beginnings of withdrawal.

Oddly, though, when he first came in Jack had noticed a look pass between the shopkeeper and the girl.

 Then, as the tense silence reached an almost unbearable level, she said, “All you had to do was give us the stuff, and we wouldn’t be here, now.”  She was glaring back at Alphonse.  “You can still make this right.”

She used the word ‘stuff’ not money.  A flicker of memory jumped out of the depths on Jack’s mind, something discussed at the dinner table with their neighbors, something about the shop as a pick-up point for drugs.

The boy on the floor, he was not here for the money.

Jack thought he’d try another approach.  “Look, I don’t want trouble, and you don’t want trouble.  I’ll go, forget this ever happened.  You might want to do the same.  There’s nothing you can do for him now.”

The boy was intermittently writhing and moaning.  It looked to Jack like it might be more than just withdrawal.

The girl looked at the man on the ground, at the door, and back again, like she was thinking.  The gun, though, still moved between him and the shopkeeper.

Another assessment of the girl; she was completely out of place here, now.  It was evident she was from a better class of people, a different part of town.  Caught up in a downward spiral because of her acquaintance on the floor.

Caught in a situation she was not equipped to deal with.

© Charles Heath 2018-2020