Angels in Heaven

to walk toward the Nus’ garbage bin,
which was right between me and the truck. Then a man in overalls and baseball
cap came out of Mr. Nu’s back door lugging a heavy carton, not hurrying, taking
his time, not looking at all suspicious. A second man, similarly attired in
plain white overalls and cap, came out behind the first carrying two smaller
cartons; they loaded them casually into the back of their truck without giving
me a glance, then went back inside again.
    Ah-ah, I thought.
    If I, I thought, saw someone six foot
seven and a quarter walking toward me in an alley carrying a wastepaper basket,
I’d give him a glance, a deeply searching one.
    When the two men —youths would
be more accurate— emerged the next time, again toting cartons, I was banging my
wastepaper basket against the inside of the garbage bin as if I’d just finished
emptying it.
    “Mr. Nu around, gents?” I called to
them. “Need a quick word with him.” A deceptively simple question, I thought.
They couldn’t very well say he wasn’t around, because if he wasn’t around, what
the hell were they doing being around? So if they had any brains at all, they’d
have to say he was around, which the taller of them did. Of course that left
them with the problem that if he was around, where was he?
    “Yeah, he’s here,” the tall one said.
“He’s up front. I’ll give him a shout. You hang on here, Mick, there’s only one
wore load anyway.”
    So Mick, or whatever his real name
was, hung on, leaning against the side of the truck, looking cool, calm, and
collected w hile his pal disappeared inside once again, then came
back out with a last armful, the greedy thing.
    “He’ll be right out,” he called to
me. He loaded the last of the cartons, slammed the rear doors shut, locked
them, said to Mick, “Let’s do it, man,” and then they headed, one on each side
of the van, for the front doors. Which move I did not care for overmuch, as it
meant they were split up. But I had run out of choices by then, so I let the
wastepaper basket drop, revealing the revolver, which I stupidly held pointing
down at the ground.
    “Let’s all wait for Mr. Nu together,
gents,” I said pleasantly. “Let us do that, just to please an old busybody.”
    “Hey, man, no sweat,” the tall one
said. “What is this anyway?”
    They weren’t bad, for amateurs. With
no signal between them that I could see, the one on the driver’s side, the side
away from me, wrenched the door open and jumped in while] the tall one pulled
out some kind of popgun (a homemade .22, we found out later) and fired three
quick shots at me. Luckily for me he was on the move when he fired; he was
jumping for the door on his side, and all he did was (again, I found out later)
drill two neat holes in the left leg of my second-favorite cords. I assumed the
position—a half crouch, feet planted firmly apart, left hand holding the
weapon, the right hand under the wrist of the left hand—and caught the, kid in
his upper right shoulder just before he got all the way into the cab. The one
in the driver’s seat revved the motor, and I thought he was going to try to
make a run for it, but he left it too long. I put the next two shots into the
windshield, shooting high on purpose; he cut the motor and that was that.
    Mrs. Morales popped out her back door
about then to see what all the commotion was about. I asked her to please call
the cops and an ambulance pronto and to keep everyone else inside, all of which
she did without going into hysterics or asking any foolish questions. The cops arrived
surprisingly quickly. Too late to be of any help, of course, but still quickly,
closely followed by an ambulance and then two more cop cars.
    I told my story for the first time,
but far from the last, to a sergeant from one of the squad cars who seemed only
mildly interested, but when he started slipping in the occasional trick
question, I realized his uninterested manner was just part of his technique.
The ambulance took off with the wounded youth. Two of the squad cars left. One
of the remaining cops tried Mr. Nu’s back door, but it had locked automatically
and hadn’t been forced; the boys must have gotten hold of some legitimate keys
somehow.
    I told my story again in my office,
this time for a lieutenant, and produced my firearms license and investigator’s
permit without being asked. The only lie I told was I said I’d pegged the tall
one from just inside my premises, from the