Lightning
Strikes
by
Gregory Meece
People who say lightning
can’t strike twice lack imagination. Take the
church at the end of Main Street. The cops were chasing some boys who might’ve
swiped something from the car lot on the east end of Main. They hit the sharp
bend at the west end too late and—BLAM!—right through the stained glass. A
“Sinners Welcome” sign dangling above the hole seemed fitting for their arrival.
Just two weeks later, the
paper shows another car, an Impala, if you can
believe it, protruding from the same church—the ass end of the car sticking out
of the plywood patch they installed over the vestibule window after the last
incident. They haven’t found the drunk who parked it there.
The pastor blamed the devil
for the unlikely double desecration. Some
folks blamed dumb luck. I don’t know about the devil—plenty of dumb, of course.
The point is, lightning’s gonna do what it’s gonna do. Happened to me, too.
The first time lightning
struck close to me, a fat guy was out walking
when I came up from behind and interrupted his ten-thousand daily steps. I
don’t carry a gun, but what matters is that those being robbed believe I do.
I’ve never heard anyone with what they think is a pistol pointed between their
kidneys say, “You’re kidding, right?”
I emptied his wallet of
three Jacksons and two Hamiltons, a presidential
full house, which was better than the last hand I was dealt—two pair, Jacksons
over Lincolns.
I returned the wallet because
being a thief doesn’t mean you can’t be a
gentleman. His wallet might have been lighter now, but his bloated carcass was
as big as ever, and he still had to wedge it into his pants like stuffing a
sausage casing.
He had been panting from
towing all those L-bees around, but suddenly he
stopped breathing and fell flat on his face. Normally, I’d have taken off right
away, like a fox with something warm and furry between its jaws, but the guy
wasn’t moving. I got curious and asked, “You okay, fella?” Nothing came out of
him—not a word, not a breath. I didn’t look back.
The next day, the paper
reported that a man died while walking; most
likely, his heart gave out. Ironically, it was probably because a fat guy like
him was trying to postpone cashing in his chips with those ten-thousand steps.
The cops wouldn’t blame his death on an empty wallet. Lots of people have that
condition.
Just to be safe, I held
off robbing anyone for a while. At least, until I
spotted an old lady shuffling toward her car with a walker. She’d just
withdrawn a wad of cash from the ATM. I couldn’t resist.
I didn’t even have
to stick my finger in her back. The moment I barked,
“Drop the purse, lady!” she froze, threw up her bony hands. The bag landed
square on my foot—the purse, not the old lady. It was right there on top—four of
a kind, all Benjamins, smiling at me. The woman looked like she was going to
cry. But she didn’t. She just crumbled beside her walker. Her wrinkly eyes kept
staring at me. No use worrying about her telling the cops who she saw, though.
She was already gone.
It was her time, anyway.
The prune looked older than my mother did when
she died, and they said my mother died of old age. So, this lady must have,
too.
Funny thing, the last two
people I robbed died right in front of me.
Lightning. It does whatever it wants. Just because you draw an ace-high
straight one time doesn’t mean you won’t pull the same cards the next. You’ve
got to have some imagination to picture that, but it happens.
Gregory
Meece is a retired educator and short fiction author whose work has been
published in more than two dozen anthologies and magazines, including Black
Cat Weekly, Thriller Magazine, Bristol Noir, Punk Noir,
Larceny & Last Chances, Love Letters to Poe, and Mystery
Most Traditional. Visit his website at MeeceTales.com.