Next, he could see movement on the lawn. The two arch criminals were spread out flat on the grass.
Officer Kay, the police sharpshooter – rifle at her shoulder, finger near the trigger, and crimson angry about having her Saturday wrecked — could see them too.
Again they heard the police bullhorn. “Could it get any worse than this?” said Chunky. They’d had a hard time for a long time, the two of them. This time, though, it was more than one of life’s little fender benders. This time it was serious. This time it was the two of them, friendless, in the grass with the bugs.
With sirens whooping and bullhorns threatening, Skinny was eating yet another Snickers and tossing his knife up in the air. Except, this time when it dropped, it stuck in his thigh. “Oww, oww, oww!” Already attracted to the Snickers, a trail of ants trooped toward the wound.
Chunky looked around for an escape route and then over at Skinny. Despite himself, a smile showed in his eyes. His partner lying there in the grass, with lights flashing, sirens whooping, and cops threatening, there was his partner eating more Snickers and playing with his new knife. Flipping it up higher and higher in the air to see how many times it would turn over and still stick in the ground when it landed. “I am up to four,” he announced. Except, this last time it stuck in his thigh. And when he took it out, it made a gash that bled, flowed, non-stop.
Chunky stared and sighed and wiped his eyes and said, “There’s no escape. You’re not going anywhere today with that mess, except to the hospital. We need to get you there.” So he raised their hands like he’d seen on TV. The police gathered the two of them in. The ambulance arrived. Eventually, the whole bunch disappeared.
When Susan arrived home, she hugged Jim. Hard. Sometimes Jim forgot just how strong she was. True, she studied the mud on the kitchen floor for longer than she might have. But she didn’t say a word.
You can search the internet for a very long time and find no reference at all to the incident in Susan and Jim’s yard. Or what happened to Chunky and Skinny. It turns out, though, that the convenience store owner became something of a local celebrity, with people in the neighbourhood having their pictures taken with him and posted online. For years he was pointed to as the man, unarmed mind you, who stood up to the wrong end of a gun and a knife.
Officer Kay, now Sargeant Kay, received a medal for exemplary conduct. Mostly she was disappointed she didn’t get the chance to shoot.
Their garden didn’t do any better or worse this year than it had last year, or the year before for that matter. The ant hills returned between the patio cracks. The peony’s colour turned out to be something called coral.
You could look it up.
