Death by Chocolate

look in his eye that he’d had the night he cut Franky
Caruso’s nose off with a broken beer bottle in a bar fight.
    “You shoot that bitch or I
will.... and then I’ll shoot you, too, you faggot! See if I ever pull another
job with you.”
    Rodney felt his blood boil,
his face flush red. He felt like he was ten years old again and Ferris was his
big cousin, shaming him, making him feel weak and small. He hated that. He
hated that more than anything.
    He’d show Ferris. He’s show
everybody on the eleven o’clock news.
    Shoving his .357 magnum
against the woman’s cheek, he screamed, “Give me the fuckin’ ring, woman, or
I’ll blow your brains out. Right now!”
    In some dark corner of his
mind, Rodney heard himself hoping that she’d refuse. He’d shoot her there and
then and the whole world would see; they’d all be watching on TV and—
    The door opened right
behind him and Rodney spun around to see an old lady and old man toddling in.
The woman wore a bright flowery dress and was shuffling along with a walker.
The guy was stooped over and moved slow and stiff, like he’d just pooped his
pants.
    Great, that was just what
they needed. A couple more knuckleheads to contend with.... a couple that
probably didn’t have a dime between them.
    “Hey, you two,” Rodney
shouted at them. “Get over there with the others and put your hands up.”
    The woman took several
halting steps toward him. “Eh? What did you say? Sorry, but I’m a mite deaf in
both ears.”
    “What’s the matter?” asked
her decrepit companion as he moved closer to Ferris. “Is the bank closed or
something? We thought it was open this time of day.”
    “You picked the wrong time
to go banking, you old fart,” Ferris said as he swaggered over to the man and
waved his gun in his face. Ferris swaggered everywhere, Rodney thought, with a
gagging feeling in his throat. Ferris got a lot of girls with his tight jeans
and wife-beater shirts that showed his muscles and that damned swagger of his.
    Rodney would have loved to
wear shirts like that, but he had too many pimples on his back and not enough biceps
to pull off the look.
    He glanced up at the camera
and wished for a moment that he’d worn something nicer than his tie-dyed
T-shirt with a hole in the front where his chest hairs stuck out.
    The gal in the flowered
dress with the walker came right up next to him and looked him up and down,
like his grandma had before he’d left for school each morning when he’d been a
kid. And like Grandma Flynn, she had a disapproving scowl on her face.
    “What do you think you’re
doing there, son?” she said. ‘You shouldn’t go waving a gun around like that.
It might be loaded. You could put somebody’s eye out with that thing.”
    Ferris gouged the guy in
the ribs with his gun. Hard. The old man stood up a little straighten ‘You and
your wife better get over there with everybody else before we kill you both,”
Ferris told him.
    Yeah,” Rodney said, feeling
a surge of power that he’d never felt before in all of his twenty-two years.
‘Yeah, you’d better do what you’re told or I’ll shoot you... just like I’m
gonna shoot this stupid bitch over here who doesn’t wanna give me her ring.”
    He turned away from the
grandma and returned his attention to the young woman with the big, sparkly
ring on her finger. “I’m tired of waiting around for you,” he said. “I think
I’ll just go ahead and blow you away. That way everybody here will know that
we—er.... that is—I mean business.”
    He glanced over at Ferris.
Ferris had a stupid little grin on his face, a grin that meant he didn’t think
Rodney had the balls to do it. Yeah, well, he’d soon see....
    “You don’t want to do that,
son,” said the old woman behind him. “And I’ll give you three good reasons...”
Rodney turned and was somewhat surprised to see that she wasn’t looking at him;
she was talking to him, but she was looking at the guy she’d come in with. The
guy was looking back at her kind of funny. Like they had some sort of secret
between them.
    But Rodney couldn’t
immediately figure out what it might be, so—like most things Rodney couldn’t
understand—he ignored it.
    “One,” the woman was saying,
“when they catch you, you’ll be charged with murder instead of just plain ol’
bank robbing.”
    “They ain’t gonna catch
us.” But Rodney wasn’t as sure as he had been when they’d walked in. There was
that camera in the