Street to rough up.
Trent looked like a man who was looking for trouble. He also looked like he’d found it more than a couple of times. A stocky, muscular man of twenty-eight, Trent wore his bleach-blond hair in the severe, flat-topped hairstyle popularly known as a fade. His eyes were a piercing crystal blue.
He had a scar below his left eye that ran back to his ear. He’d gotten it from being on the wrong end of a broken beer bottle in a barroom scuffle in
San Diego. It had taken a few stitches but the other guy had had to have his entire face rearranged. The guy had made the mistake of telling Trent that he thought he had a cute ass. Trent still got hot every time he thought of the episode. What a creep, that goddamned fag.
Trent went back to his bedroom and set his beer down on top of the TV. He picked up the military-issue.45 pistol that he’d “cumshawed” from a Marine for amphetamines. It felt comfortable in his large hand. Gripping the pistol with both hands, Trent leveled the barrel straight at the TV screen with arms stiff and elbows locked. He spun around to point the gun out the open window.
Across the street a woman was opening her bedroom window. “Tough luck, baby,” Trent whispered. He aimed the pistol carefully, lowering the barrel until the front and rear sights lined
up perfectly, targeting the woman’s torso. Slowly, deliberately, Trent pulled the cold steel of the trigger.
As the firing mechanism clicked, Trent called out “Pow!” as he pretended the gun kicked in the air from its recoil. He smiled. He could have drilled the woman if he’d put in the clip. In his mind’s eye he saw her hurled back into her apartment, a neat hole through her chest and blood squirting out.
Laying the pistol on the TV next to his beer bottle, Trent grabbed one of the vials of Marcaine from the bureau. Tossing it in the air, he caught it with his other hand behind his back. He calmly sauntered back to the kitchen to retrieve the necessary paraphernalia from its hiding place.
First he had to remove the glasses from the shelf of one of his kitchen cabinets next to the refrigerator. Then he gently lifted the plywood square that led to his secret cache: a small vault of space between the cabinet’s back and the exterior wall. Trent brought out a single vial filled with yellow fluid and an array of 18-gauge syringes. He’d picked up the vial from a Colombian in Miami. The syringes easily came into his possession through his hospital job. He carried both vials and the syringes back to his bedroom along with a propane torch he kept under the kitchen sink.
Trent reached for his bottle and took another swig of beer. He set the propane torch on a small tripod he kept folded under his bed. Taking a cigarette from the pack by the television set, he lit it with a match.
Trent took a long drag, then lit the propane torch with the cigarette.
Next, he took one of the 18-gauge needles. After drawing up a tiny amount of the yellow fluid, he heated the tip of the needle until it glowed red hot. Keeping the needle in the flame, he picked up the vial of Marcaine and heated its top until it too started to become red. With deft, practiced moves, he pushed the hot needle through the molten glass and deposited a drop of the yellow fluid. Next was the trickiest part. After disposing of the needle, Trent began to twirl the vial, slipping it back into the hottest part of the flame. He kept it there for a few seconds, long enough for the puncture site to fuse closed.
He continued to twirl the vial even after.he pulled it from the flame. He didn’t stop until the glass had cooled considerably.
“Shit!” Trent said as he watched the very end of the vial suddenly dimple into an unwanted depression. Though virtually unnoticeable, Trent couldn’t risk the blemish. If someone was careful enough to notice, they’d discard the vial as a defect. Or