Trader was suddenly aware of the hard lumpy package he was perched on beside the Dumpster. He felt for it with his free hand and began to rip off the paper wrapping as he pitched the fresh cigarette in the dirt.
“Guns,” he declared, and then he further realized that maybe he could use one to shoot off his stuck zipper, as long as he was careful.
“Oh my!” Hooter exclaimed. “What you be sitting on guns for? That’s mighty dangerous, and why you have them to begin with all wrapped up in UPS paper?”
Trader snatched out a nine-millimeter pistol and dropped out the magazine, happy that it was fully loaded, even if he was unfamiliar with firearms, unless it was a flare gun. He tugged and played around with the slide until he figured it was possible a round might very well be chambered. He spread his knees wide and carefully fired.
“Godamighty!” he yelled when the bullet pinged off the brass zipper slide and ricocheted into the Dumpster with a loud thunk.
“You insane!” Hooter screamed, backing up a few steps and almost falling. “What’chu trying to shoot your privates for?”
Trader lined up the zipper slide in the sights again and squeezed the trigger, furious when the bullet ricocheted off the slide and whizzed straight up, knocking out the streetlight. The zipper was indestructible, clenching its teeth in a death grip while Trader fired again and again, ejected cartridge cases sailing and clinking in the dirt as Hooter ran through the alleyway screeching for the police and waving her arms at the big helicopters flying overhead.
“Help! Help!” she hollered up at the Black Hawks. “Get down here and stop this crazy man! He trying to shoot his privates off and keep missing! But soon enough, he gonna hit something! Help! Help!”
Andy was parking in front of Judy Hammer’s house when the call came over the radio.
“Promiscuous shooting in the five thousand block of Patterson Avenue. Any officer in the area. Report of shots fired in the alleyway.”
Hammer appeared on the front porch, wondering why Andy wasn’t getting out of his car. She came down the steps to investigate.
“What are you doing?” Hammer asked as Andy rolled down his window.
“There’s a shooting and nobody’s responding,” he said, getting excited. “I guess all the city units must be tied up on other shootings and looking for the Hispanic.”
“Let’s go,” she said without hesitation, climbing in.
They roared off with the blue grill lights and siren going full tilt while the city police dispatcher continued trying to raise an officer to respond to Patterson Avenue.
“Three-thirty,” Andy said over the radio, using his former unit number from his days with the Richmond police department.
“Three-thirty,” the dispatcher came back and sounded slightly confused, because she remembered Andy’s pleasant voice and knew he didn’t work for the city any longer.
“Responding to Patterson Avenue,” Andy said.
“Ten-four, former unit three-thirty.”
“You know exactly where in the alleyway?” he asked into the mike.
“Ten-ten, three-thirty,” which was the city’s way of saying, “Negative, Officer Brazil or whoever is riding around pretending to be Officer Brazil.”
Dispatcher Betty Freakley turned around to the 911 operators sitting behind her and shrugged.
“I thought he’d gone and signed up with the state police. What’s he doing riding around in the city again?” she asked.
All the 911 operators were busy. Things were hopping in Richmond this night. An intoxicated white male had fallen down in the yard while taking his dog out. A black female was lying in the middle of the street near Eggleston’s grocery store. An infant had eaten all the little beads inside a purple Beanie Baby Millennium Y2K bear. There were several car wrecks, and most officers were tied up looking for a Hispanic male suspect driving a Grand Prix with New York plates. But the urgent matter that caught Hammer’s attention was the report of a male with a bag over his head who was trying to rob Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits on Chamberlayne Avenue.
“I wonder if that’s the same man who tried to rob the tollbooth last year,” Hammer said. “What’s his name? He ran into the tollbooth because the holes he cut in the bag were in the wrong place and he couldn’t see.”